Still, I'll admit to being surprised. In yesterday's update, I was using PredictIt's estimate of 70% chance for Moore's victory, but in all honesty, I thought his chances were higher, and part of that is my own assessment of the politics of Alabama. If I were a better person, I'd apologize to Alabama for aspersions cast...
Anywho... I'll spend some time digging through exit polls to see what happened, but for now, I promised yesterday that if Moore lost, I'd write about Tim Huelskamp. So, here goes. In my typically circuitous way, of course.
Alvin Greene. Who is not Tim Huelskamp. Does anyone remember Alvin Greene? He was Jim DeMint's last challenger for his South Carolina Senate seat. Greene was a crazy dude, dishonorably discharged from the military, who faced some additional legal problems for showing up on college campuses, creeping around and trying to get college girls to watch porn for him. Yeah, creepy dude. When confronted about it... this happened.
Um... Greene lost. Realistically, DeMint was gonna win, almost no matter what. But, what if something weird had been revealed about DeMint? What if, say, DeMint had what we now sometimes call a "Macaca moment?" The term comes from George Allen. In his 2006 reelection campaign for his Virginia Senate seat, while followed around by a member of his opponent's campaign, this happened. The volunteer for his opponent's campaign was of South Asian descent.
Yeah... weird, right? What the fuck does "macaca" mean? It is the French slur for North African immigrants, referring to macaque monkeys. George Allen speaks fluent French, and his family spends a lot of time in France. He knew what he was saying.
If his opponent had been a crazy person with a criminal record, a dishonorable discharge and all that, Allen probably still would have won. But, he was facing Jim Webb-- former Secretary of the Navy under Reagan, running as a Democrat. Webb won.
This shows the importance of having a credible candidate, just in case your opponent steps in it.
Roy Moore... well, that's been covered. He found himself facing someone just credible enough to beat him. Again, I'll admit surprise to the fact that Alabama was willing to consider a Democrat, but the fact that the Democrats had a basically credible candidate on the ballot meant that the Republicans having nominated the worst candidate ever allowed them to lose.
Narrowly.
At this point, the obligatory reference is Jon Krasno's Challengers, Competition and Reelection, which addresses the importance and nuances of challenger quality in Senate elections. Roy Moore was an odd case. By Krasno's measure, he was certainly famous. He had elected experience at the state level. He had an appeal to a lot of Alabama voters... There's just that child rape thing. Doug Jones? Never held elected office before, not very famous...
Here's the thing about Krasno, though. If you go through his work systematically, he has revised and revamped his challenger quality scale many, many times. Why? Because Krasno knows that trying to capture that elusive thing-- that thing-- quantitatively, is hard. Roy Moore, by quantitative measures, was a quality candidate. Jones... not so much.
But there's that child rape thing...
And yet, even aside from that, party leaders in the GOP knew that they wanted nothing to do with that fucking moron, Roy Moore.
And that brings me to Tim Huelskamp.
Circuitous. I told you...
Tim Huelskamp is a now-former member of the House of Representatives from Kansas. To quote a great movie, "you remember fucking Kansas?" Huelskamp was a hardcore teabagger. GOP leadership hated him the way doctors supposedly hate peddlers of whatever snake-oil miracle cure you hopefully aren't dumb enough to try. No, they really hated Tim Huelskamp. Why? Because he was one of those people who really believed the nonsense on Fox News, talk radio, and that Republican candidates have been peddling to get votes for decades. So, he would just never vote for any deal. He was one of those people Boehner called "knuckleheads," and at one point, Boehner even stripped him of a committee assignment as punishment for not being willing to vote for bills even when the GOP had won.
In 2016, GOP establishment types got so sick of Huelskamp's shit that they ran an establishment guy against him in the primary-- Roger Marshall. Roger Marshall won!
Oh, you didn't know about that? You thought primaries only happened to moderates? That's because journalists don't do their fucking jobs, and this story doesn't fit their narrative. It matters, though. You see, Roger Marshall is now a sitting member of the House of Representatives, and Roy Moore is trying to figure out which malls don't yet have his picture up on the no-entry list for security guards to memorize. I really wish that were a joke. I really, truly do.
What is the lesson here? If you nominate the absolute bottom of the barrel candidates, it is possible to lose, even in very favorable circumstances.
And really, Roy Moore isn't the first here. In 2010, the GOP lost the Delaware Senate seat that Mike Castle should have won because they nominated Christine "I am not a witch" O'Donnell instead. Harry Reid won reelection because the GOP nominated Sharron "Second Amendment remedies" Angle. Michael Bennet held his Colorado Senate seat because the GOP nominated Ken "vote for me 'cuz I have dick" Buck.
Remember Todd "legitimate rape" Akin? How about Richard "rape babies are gifts from god" Mourdock?
And if Luther Strange had beaten Roy Moore in the primary, he'd have beaten Doug Jones.
The GOP establishment can beat the wackos. They did it when they primaried Tim Huelskamp. Roy Moore just gave them the best argument of all time for why the fucking idiot base needs to start listening to the party leaders because they told the base not to vote for Moore before all this shit came out.
The party needs to make a few more Tim Huelskamp-style examples. It won't scare off people like Roy Moore, who is too stupid to be scared off, but the party can signal to every institutional actor in the country that they need to fight hard against any fucking dipshit like Roy Moore.
It still amazes me that nobody talks about Tim Huelskamp.