The Bubble: Right plays Alabama blame game while left rejoices Roy Moore loss
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USA Today’s Paul Singer analyzes how Doug Jones scored the first Senate win for an Alabama Democrat in 25 years against scandal-ridden Roy Moore.
Walbert Castillo, Jack Gruber
Each week, USA TODAY’s OnPolitics blog takes a look at how media from the left and the right reacted to a political news story, giving liberals and conservatives a peek into the other’s media bubble.
This week, political observers from the left and right were stunned by Democrat Doug Jones’ victory over Republican Roy Moore in the GOP stronghold of Alabama. While liberals rejoiced and interpreted Jones’ win as a harbinger of a Democratic resurgence, conservatives were divided over who was to blame for the loss.
Traditional conservatives saw the loss as a repudiation of the caustic politics of President Trump and firebrand Steve Bannon, but those aligned with Bannon’s populist insurgency thought “establishment Republicans” like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were to blame for abandoning Moore in his hour of need after he was accused of sexual misconduct.Â
Last week: Time for a #TrumpToo movement, liberals say
From the right: Blame McConnell, not Bannon
According to conservative firebrands Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, McConnell is to blame for the Democratic victory in Alabama because he supported Luther Strange in the primary over their favored candidate, Rep. Mo Brooks.Â
“McConnell deserves a lot of the blame for Alabama,” Hannity tweeted. “Mo Brooks would have won by 20% of the vote.”Â
1) MCConnell deserves a lot of the blame for Alabama. Mo Brooks would have won by 20% of the vote, and McConnell interference hurt badly. 2)Peter Strzok, Lisa Page text messages show how CORRUPT the SC Mueller and his team are. Wow! More tomorrow.
— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) December 13, 2017
Coulter blamed not only McConnell, but Jared Kushner and Trump as well in her “order of blame” for not endorsing Brooks. Still, for Coulter, there was silver lining in the defeat.Â
“The good news is, even with the media carrying on 24-7 about Moore being a ‘CHILD MOLESTER!’ and ‘PEDOPHILE,’ the election was still a nail-biter,” she said in a column for Breitbart News. “I salute the good people of Alabama and admire their contempt for the media.”Â
More: Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks announces he has prostate cancer, will undergo surgery this week
From the left: Trump and Moore were losing bets
“There is no way to overstate the significance of this upset,” wrote Alex Shepard for the New Republic. “And it shows that the gamble the Republicans took with an utterly compromised figure like Moore — not to mention Donald Trump — was a spectacularly poor one that will result in Democratic victories in 2018 and beyond.”
The win shows Democrats can compete anywhere because their base is fired up and the Republican base is not, Shepard said.Â
Republican voters are demoralized because the Republican president is enormously unpopular and the Republican Party has spent the past year doing enormously unpopular things. Yes, the Moore allegations made a big difference in this race. But they obscure the most important aspect of the special election in Alabama, which is that Republican voters are staying home across the country, while Democrats are voting at unprecedented levels.
More: Top takeaways from Doug Jones’ shocking victory over Roy Moore in Alabama
From the right: ‘It was a mass rebellion’
“Tonight, Alabama conservatives told Steve Bannon and, yes, Donald Trump, that integrity matters,” the National Review‘s David French wrote Tuesday. “They told their party that some victories aren’t worth the cost. They declared that partisanship isn’t worth grotesque moral compromise. The deep South said no to Roy Moore’s bigotry. It said no to his ignorance and malice.”
Alabama is as red as it gets and the closest “Senate election in a generation was a 19-point GOP victory in 2002,” French said. “In other words, what happened tonight wasn’t the result of changed hearts and minds in a tiny few swing votes. It was a mass rebellion.”Â
More: Doug Jones’ surprise win in the Alabama Senate race just upended the GOP agenda for 2018
From the left: ‘Stop trying to win over Republican voters’Â
“The lesson here is simple: Democrats should stop chasing those elusive Republicans who have had enough,” Salon‘s Amanda Marcotte said. “Generally speaking, they will vote for a child molester over a Democrat. There is no ‘too far’ for Republicans, at least when it comes to beating Democrats. Instead, stop treating constituencies that loyally vote for Democrats as an afterthought, and put them first, both in policy and in organizing.”Â
Jones’ victory showed that strategy is effective and not “just because Moore was repeatedly and credibly accused of being a child molester,” she said. “The liberal base is angry, organized and ready to go. A Democrat won Alabama — in an off-year special election. In less than a year, the question will be whether the Democrats can replicate that victory on a large scale across the country.”Â
More: Roy Moore supporters disappointed, but holding onto hope for a recount
From the right: Trump’s ‘angry populism’ only goes so far
“The obvious lesson here is that angry populism fueled by resentment against the bogeyman of supposed ‘elites’ is not the basis for a political party or movement,” The Federalist‘s Robert Tracinski wrote.Â
Tracinski said Moore tried to follow Trump’s “angry populist playbook” of crying “fake news” and decrying elitist conspiracies. “It’s a formula that covers a multitude of sins,” he said. “Until it doesn’t.”Â
Trump upended conventional wisdom with his constant, off-putting combativeness and willingness to pander to a relatively narrow conservative base at the expense of everyone else. But with Moore, the obvious downsides of that approach are becoming obvious. He may have retained the loyalty of his die-hard, core supporters, but at the expense of alienating everyone else.
Analysis: Why Trump will pay the political price for Roy Moore’s loss in Alabama
From the left: ‘Black voters saved the country again’Â
“There was healing justice in the way the vote rolled in from Alabama Tuesday night, as Democrat Doug Jones defeated racist, ultra-right, deposed judge and accused child molester Roy Moore,”The Nation‘s Joan Walsh said.Â
“Progressives rarely get so much to savor, literally or symbolically,” she wrote. “The bottom line is that black voters saved the country once again.”Â
A roster of groups devoted to black turnout, from Black PAC to #BlackVotersMatter to the NAACP, plus a web of small Alabama groups, pioneered new approaches that will be studied and possibly replicated in 50 states come November 2018. Once again, though, let’s take a moment to thank black women, who supported Jones 98-2.
More: In Alabama, black voters rescued white voters from their worst impulses
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