Republican campaign professionals conceded Wednesday that the party’s loss of a Senate seat in ruby red Alabama was a troubling sign for the party but insisted that winning with Roy Moore would have been worse.
Doug Jones’ special election victory in Alabama, which hadn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate in decades, foreshadowed a possibly tough midterm campaign for the Republicans. Democratic enthusiasm was high, minority turnout reached Obama-era levels, and suburban support for the GOP was down.
But for Republican operatives preparing for the 2018 campaign, it was still a win of sorts, protecting the party’s fundraising, candidate recruitment, and messaging from being derailed by a renegade with his own agenda, senior Republicans said in interviews.
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Swing states and battleground House districts are on the firing line, and the controversial Moore, with his penchant for the spotlight, could have compounded the GOP’s political challenges. The single seat Moore lost wasn’t worth the several more he might have jeopardized next year, they said.
“There are some warning signs from [Tuesday] night that continue a trend,” said Republican pollster Chris Wilson, who lives in Oklahoma City and advises a national roster of candidates. “But I’ll take a short-term loss over long-term harm to the GOP. Roy Moore had no place in the U.S. Senate.”
Jones, 63, defeated Moore, 70, by 1.5 percentage points after the retired judge’s campaign was rocked by multiple allegations of sexual misconduct that he denied but never fully explained. Even before those revelations, Moore was a liability to the Republican Party.
Moore was twice removed from the elected post of Alabama Supreme Court chief justice for ignoring federal court orders. His long history of fiery rhetoric about politically charged social issues — gay marriage, abortion, religion — threatened to make the contest more competitive than it should have been.
As voting was underway, a Moore campaign spokesman told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the Republican nominee “probably” stood by previous comments that homosexuality should be illegal. He then professed his own opinion Muslims cannot serve in government because the law requires swearing the oath of office on a Christian Bible.
Republicans were expecting plenty of this — and worse — from Moore in the heat of the midterm. They fretted that their candidates would be pressed to answer for him, risking their prospects in competitive races, especially in suburban strongholds usually friendly to the GOP but unhappy with President Trump and sensitive to offensive rhetoric.
“No question having Roy Moore go away is a relief to members in California swing seats — particularly those with upscale suburbs,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist in Sacramento, Calif. “He would have been a huge liability, serving to demoralize many GOP voters and further hype mid-propensity Democrat voters to get to the polls.”
The Democrats are targeting about a half-dozen traditionally Republican, GOP-held California districts that Trump lost in 2016 to Democrat Hillary Clinton. The GOP’s 24-seat House majority could rest on additional districts across the country just like these — historically Republican but won by Clinton.
The party’s Senate majority, just 51 seats once Jones takes over for appointed Sen. Luther Strange, R-Ala., also is less than secure, although the map for Senate Republicans remains favorable.
The Republicans are vulnerable because key voting blocs are highly dissatisfied with Trump. Even in where the president’s job approval is near or at 50 percent and doing much better than his poor national ratings, women, non-whites and younger voters are unhappy with his leadership.
As what happened in Virginia and suburban territory near Philadelphia and New York, (and to a degree, Alabama) where Democrats swept in off year elections in November on the strength of more enthusiastic turnout and a repudiation of the White House, congressional Republicans could pay the price.
In sacrificing Moore, Republican operatives are hoping that the party has rid itself of a looming 2018 problem and taught conservative activists a valuable lesson.
“I hope it gives primary voters a check on their emotional impulse to do the most incendiary thing possible just for the sake of being heard,” a Republican consultant said, on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly.
Moore was endorsed by Trump, and enjoyed the nominal support of the Republican National Committee. He also was backed by Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist and the Breitbart News executive chairman, who championed the retired judge as part of his proxy war with the Republican establishment for control of the party.
But Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and their campaign arm, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the broader party establishment outside of the White House, shunned the candidate after the sexual misconduct allegations were publicized, yanking all material support.
Moore has a cultivated strong relationship with conservative activists that stretched beyond Alabama.
Some of his supporters are warning that grassroots voters will punish Senate Republicans in next year’s primaries for abandoning Moore and effectively rooting for Jones to win, creating the same problems, and fanning the very insurgency, the GOP hoped to avoid by ridding itself of him in the first place.
Noel Fritsch, a conservative campaign consultant, said the backlash would be similar to that which occurred after the Republican establishment nuked Sen. Thad Cochran’s challenger in a 2014 GOP primary in Mississippi.
“While Mitch McConnell, [his super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund] and the NRSC believe they’re winning,” Fritsch said, “it is the country club Republicans’ hatred for the grassroots and their lawless behavior that launched the Remember Mississippi movement in 2014, galvanized an army of deplorables against D.C., the Bushes, the Clintons and media elites, and which will forever cement the death of the GOP as we know it under a new banner — Remember Alabama.”
