Well Moore was one of trump’s early enthusiastic followers and even when Trump was endorsing his competitor during the primaries. Trump was obviously still supporting Moore.
Moore is exactly the kind of primary challenger repubs are afraid of. Trumpist far right weirdos that can knock them out of their seats at the primary level.
But he just lost an unloseable race. So Trumps vague threats of primary challenges just lost some oomph. By blaming write ins. And blaming Shelby Trump can reassert that threat. Demonize the establishment.
Kind of. The threat of getting knocked out by a Trumpy primary challenger is still there. But it starts to look more like an own goal where putting yutzes and scumbags up just loses the GOP their congressional majority.
Looks great from where I stand. Infighting and a party rift on the GOP side is great for non fascists.
To be fair, those percentages are of people who voted. White turnout was disproportionalty low compared to black turnout. I suspect that there were plenty of people who were disgusted by Moore, but just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat.
Both Democrats and Republicans want their wins at all cost, perhaps these days the Republicans are more desperate but i see both of them equally out of touch and greedy. Their want to hold onto power at the cost of Americans ability to get by is quite the definition of a pyrrhic victory. I not-so-secretly hope someone like the Pirate Party would be a thing so i wouldn’t have to vote for these assholes.
I actually live in Maryland, one of the few states that is Gerrymandered by Democrats. After the 2010 census they carefully drew the lines to ensure that MD would send only one Republican to congress instead of two.
I have a course of action to propose to them: get voting in the primaries.
160,000 people voted in the D Senate primary Jones won. 105,000 voted for him in that primary. 670,000 voted for him in the general. That’s a solid half million voters who apparently did not care much who the D nominee was.
The Democratic party isn’t some magical beast that flies by every 2 or 4 years allowing you to choose from the options it presents. Its the people who show up to work in it, and the people who bother to vote in its elections about who to run for office.
There were many, many people who worked very, very hard on this campaign - particularly registering voters and getting out the African-American vote (higher voter turnout than with Obama). Does that mean that awful people don’t live in Alabama and chose to vote for Moore? No. But I refuse to bow to cynicism. Not now. Not today. We did the impossible. We elected a pro-choice Democrat in Alabama.
At this stage in 2009, with the 2010 elections coming up in 11 months, Democrats and Republicans were effectively tied. It took Republicans until the end of August in 2010 to get anywhere near the 13-point generic margin. Democrats are there now.
More important, perhaps, they’re setting themselves up for victory by recruiting candidates to run in races against Republicans in so-called safe seats — 209 of them, according to 538.com. This is important because if a nationwide wave breaks for Democrats they will have bodies everywhere that can ride the wave.
Most telling, perhaps, of all the exit-poll data from Alabama was that President Trump’s approval rating among those who turned out to vote was 48 percent, a full 14 points below his vote tally in 2016. So either many people who like him just didn’t turn out for Moore, or Trump is significantly less popular even among Republicans than we have been led to believe.
If Trump can’t break 50 percent approval among voters in Alabama, he’s going to have to do something to get people beyond his solid one-third of the nation to think well of him and his party. Otherwise, as the Alabama results suggest, the GOP is going to be smashed into a million pieces next November.
