The Doug Jones signs remain on the well-manicured lawns of Montgomery, Alabama, and the winning side is savoring the moment. I asked a resident of Carriage Hills, a quiet, largely African-American neighborhood in the southeastern part of the city, whether any of the neighbors had put out Roy Moore signs. “Oh, yes,” she said, with a laugh, but I saw no cases of it when I drove around. Maybe Moore supporters have hastened to expunge the memory.
As preposterous as Roy Moore was, flipping Alabama from red to blue required not only Republican demoralization but Democratic turnout. I spent a feverish 36 hours driving around the state in advance of the special election on Tuesday night, and spent much of Wednesday taking stock of the afterglow. When I asked black Alabamians whether they’d personally done anything to affect the election, several said they’d posted appeals on Facebook, and one said she’d driven family and friends to the polls. Apparently, it worked. The elderly African-American man who told me he’d voted for Roy Moore was a fluke. Apparently, the young African-American mom I met in a parking lot who indicated that, yes, she was going to vote even though she didn’t normally do so, represented some kind of trend: according to exit polling, black turnout was higher on Tuesday than for Barack Obama in 2012.
Now it’s time to consider the winner and sort through some of the wreckage of the losers:
Doug Jones, a Democrat, is going to the Senate for three years. Realistically speaking, no Democrat is going to win re-election in 2020, when Jones is up again. (His replacement will be either Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks or, for all we know, a post-Department-of-Justice Jeff Sessions.) But almost no one who gets to the Senate wants to leave, unless it’s for something like a Cabinet post. Several Republicans told me that if Doug Jones were pro-life, they’d vote for him, but Jones cannot renege on that, unless he wants to be known as a liar. He could, of course, break his promises and take a drastic swing to the right—on issues like immigration and abortion—but the loss of Democratic voters would surely outweigh the gain in Republican voters. So perhaps he just takes a hard swing in the other direction and joins Bernie Sanders and others in the Senate, voting a dream agenda for himself and going out in glory. Struggling to remain in office and compromising, and then losing, seems like the worst option of all.
Is Steve Bannon done for? No and yes. Breitbart remains a powerful news site with lots of employees and traffic. But Bannon has severely weakened himself. Reports that Trump is furious over Moore’s loss and Bannon’s advice, however thinly sourced they may be, are probably true. Bannon was previously riding high, because Trump had stopped valuing the advice of Jared Kushner, and Bannon had helped get Moore through the primaries. He also had the credit of having told Trump, after the Access Hollywood recordings emerged, that he was 100 percent assured of victory. He seems to have thrown the dice and offered Trump a similar assurance on Moore. That failed. Now Trump isn’t going to be listening to Bannon. And Matt Drudge, who was repulsed by Moore, is also alienated, further reducing Breitbart’s reach.
Has Trumpist-style nationalism turned the corner and gone into sharp decline? That seems to be the read of many observers, but most of these observers already hated the Trumpian agenda, which puts their disinterest in doubt. Now, Trumpism may indeed be dead, or it may never even have lived. Prior to 2016, the idea of someone sounding Trump’s notes of populism and making it to the White House wouldn’t have been taken seriously. There were few indications that “Middle American Radicals,” people who had a conservative social outlook but a leftish economic one, made up more than a quarter of voters. (Even now, they have been married awkwardly to party loyalists and rich people.) But to say that the Moore election was an important barometer of this movement seems like a stretch. Roy Moore was a historically ludicrous character, and those who pretended to love him, like Bannon, made even outside observers feel embarrassed. (People at Roy Moore’s church vouched for him. No one else, it seems, could stand him.) The loss of Ed Gillespie in Virginia was a much more significant, if unsurprising, rejection of Trumpism. The failure of Paul Nehlen to get more than a handful of votes in a primary against Paul Ryan was an even more meaningful indication of Trumpism’s limits. Trumpism may never have had a chance to begin with, but to use this election as the proof seems like wishful argument.
Finally, there’s Trump himself. Are Republicans going to toss him to his enemies now? They might. I’ve argued that after they got their tax cut they’d effectively ditch him. (Interestingly, in his speech at Roy Moore’s rally, Bannon said the same thing, which probably undermines the value of my prognostications.) But this could be wrong. Low as Trump’s poll numbers might be, Republicans still support him in large numbers, over 80 percent. As I mentioned in in my dispatch yesterday, I was struck by how much Republicans in Alabama admire Trump. They feel he’s doing good things. They don’t speak of him as they did of Moore—as an unsavory vessel in service of possible good. They simply speak of him as good. And they’ll expect Republicans in Washington to stay loyal to him. People like Mitch McConnell are skilled enough at stagecraft to allow things to happen while pretending to oppose them, but that works better for matters that aren’t being followed closely. This would be something everyone was watching. Republican voters aren’t tired of their president, and, until that changes, Republican representatives and senators won’t be tired of him either. Officially, that is.
