Much is being written about the Moore loss in Alabama. Wishful-thinking Democrats will try to see it as the forefront of a wave promising good things for 2018. Republicans looking for a bright side will see a bullet dodged.
I’m inclined to think we see another unfortunate example of an oddball primary where a quite small segment of the electorate turns out in large numbers. Doing so, they nominate someone who doesn’t have a great chance of general election success. The Tea Party did this a couple of times with people who had to say they weren’t witches and otherwise suffered from foot-in-mouth.
There is definitely an Alabama constituency for Roy Moore’s defiant culture warrior stance, it just wasn’t a majority that would stick with him in the face of multiple allegations of harassment. A generic Republican with no baggage would have been elected easily, but that man didn’t win the low-turnout primary.
Tip O’Neill famously said “All politics is local,” which was, given his Boston blarney style, an exaggeration. Much is truly local, and quite a bit is not.
Today as I write this, men all over the country are reassessing whether they realistically have a future in politics, given certain half-remembered youthful indiscretions or courtship fails they’d rather stayed forgotten. For the next biennial cycle or two recruiting candidates will be more difficult for both parties, thanks to #MeToo.
