AS EXPECTED: MASSIVE GOP FINGER-POINTING FOR ALABAMA LOSS

……Thank Alabama for this man not going to Washington

 

GOP is learning:  Trump’s endorsement means the Republican candidate will lose.

 

As Democrats add the Senate seat in Alabama, the GOP is left to cast the blame for the first GOP national Senate failure in Alabama in 25 years.

 

Republicans immediately began blaming others for their failure to hold a Senate seat in the Deep South.  The truth is that the Democrat, Doug Jones took his story directly to the people.  He then put together enough support amid the voter backlash of accusations of pedophilia and other sexual misconduct against his GOP rival, the former judge, Roy Moore.

 

Even as the Republican Moore, who is down over more than 20,000 votes in the special election, Moore has refused to concede the race.   At the same time, multiple members of the GOP were pointing fingers at one another for this defeat a month after the Republicans were steamrolled in the Virginia elections.

 

The multiple accusations highlighted the many bitter divisions within the GOP that appear to be getting worse as the party looks to defend its Senate majority in the 2018 elections.  This is a task made even more difficult by the GOP’s support of their pedophile candidate’s loss and an increasingly unpopular President.

 

The blow in Tuesday’s election also highlighted voter dismay over allegations that Moore, a self-avowed Christian conservative, had decades ago pursued romantic relationships with teenage girls while he was in his 30s.  The election in Alabama also showed the limits of Trump’s political influence.

 

The Democrats celebrated their victory as they called for Jones’s immediate swearing-in, which Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as the Senate Leader isn’t going to let happen.

 

Republican lawmakers, strategists and party figures are now picking sides.  They are either with the Senate Leader, who kept his distance from Moore’s campaign, or with former White House Chief Strategist Stephen Bannon, who was among Moore’s most ardent backers.

 

In a tweet, even Trump suggested that Moore had been a weak candidate, a basic “thumbs-down” of Bannon’s support of Moore.  And some House Republicans have referred to Bannon's support performance at Moore’s rallies saying that Bannon looked like a grizzled drunk that wandered in off the back streets of Mobile.

 

According to Trump, he stated that, “If last night’s election proved anything, it proved that we need to put up great Republican candidates to increase the razor thin margins in both the House and Senate.” As usual, that came from Trump’s twitter account.

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Trump tried to defend his poor track record by saying he knew Moore would lose.  But it was Trump that at a late date supported Moore by offering an Alabama robo-call that obviously did not work.  In fact, it may have made for some Jones votes for undecided voters.

On cable news and social media, Republicans tried to explain away the Alabama loss.  But this loss leaves the GOP with just a one-seat majority in the Senate.  With John McCain missing votes due to his battle against brain cancer, Marco Rubio who is saying he might not vote for the tax cut bill and other GOP senators that realize how unpopular this bill is, the GOP’s bill can’t take more than 2, “no-votes”.

 

“Mitch McConnell should have stayed out of this race,” conservative Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-ALA) said in an interview with MSNBC. “If he would have, we would have a Republican senator coming out instead of a Democratic one.”

 

“After Alabama disaster, GOP must do the right thing and DUMP Steve Bannon,” Rep. Peter King (R-NY) wrote on Twitter, speaking for the party’s establishment wing. “If we are to Make America Great Again for all Americans, Bannon must go!”  Bannon, was denounced by many for pushing Moore’s candidacy despite allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore.  (Moore was the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, but he was removed from that position for ignoring federal court orders.)

 

Some critics pointed fingers at Senate Majority Leader McConnell for supporting Sen. Luther Strange (R-ALA) in the GOP primary.  This was support over more conservative candidates who might have beaten Moore in a runoff and maybe even Jones in the general election.

 

Moore responded to any allegations against him in a bizarre way.  He ignored the accusations by describing his campaign as a “spiritual battle” against Washington’s Republican and Democratic leaders.

 

Trump’s former deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, pointed his finger at the Republican National Committee (RNC) for cutting ties with Moore, before they did a 180 degree turn, and began lending support to Moore earlier in the month.  “I do put blame on a lot of folks that pulled out their support and then came back in too late,” Bossie of course said this only to Fox News.

With Jones in office, Democrats will now have a credible, but a still difficult path, to retake control of the Senate, two years into Trump’s term. (If Trump lasts two years!)

 

Although McConnell has said that the GOP tax overhaul will be completed before the end of the year, this would be before Jones would be seated.  However, if the tax bill isn’t done by Christmas, and Jones is sworn into office, the impact of Tuesday’s outcome on the ongoing debate could get very interesting.

 

But Moore has still shown he will not go quietly.

 

After the race was called by the Associated Press (AP), Moore declined to concede defeat, saying he believed that the margin of victory could narrow enough to trigger an automatic recount. “Realize that when the vote is this close that it’s not over.”  He then just had to add: “We also know that God is always in control.”

 

But the Alabama Republican Party said it would not support Moore’s push for a recount.  The Secretary of State, John Merrill, said that even though the margin of victory stood at more than 1%, an automatic recount could still be ordered if a review of write-in votes and military ballots narrowed the margin of victory to less than 0.5%.  But so far, the vote count for Jones has been increasing, not decreasing.

 

The Alabama special election will not be certified until between Dec. 27 to Jan. 3, giving Republicans as little as two weeks to pass a federal budget and the tax legislation with their current 52-to-48 majority.

 

Senate Democrats including Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Chris Van Hollen (MD) urged McConnell to immediately seat Jones so he can vote on the GOP’s tax bill.  But as I said, McConnell won’t let that happen.

 

The other outcome from this special election was that the exit polls showed a steep drop in support for Trump since his victory in 2016. Just 48% of voters approved of the president’s job performance.  That’s higher than the national average, but well below the Alabama levels of the 2016 election.  The approval was so high that Trump adopted Alabama as his favorite location for large rallies.

 

Alabama, the Red-est of Red states, has shown that the romance with the GOP and Trump’s presidency are being seriously tested.  The highly unpopular tax legislation isn’t helping the party and it will be a wonderful issue to campaign on in 2018 if the Republicans are able to get it passed.  Even if it doesn’t pass, it is such an unpopular proposal, just the GOP proposing it could be a good Democratic campaign tool.

 

It is possible that if the truth of what Trump is doing to the country finally gets into the minds of the nation’s voters, the Democrats might have a good chance to re-gain the House and the Senate.  That is, if they don’t screw it up.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017