The Republican establishment in Washington breathed an unusual sigh of relief Tuesday as Roy Moore, their party’s Senate candidate in a hotly contested special election in Alabama, fell to Democrat Doug Jones.
The defeat narrows the Republicans’ already slim, 52-seat majority, which will make it even harder to pass their agenda. But it enables the GOP to avoid the embarrassment of electing a candidate accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, whose provocative rhetoric, elevated by the Capitol Hill spotlight, might have tainted Republicans across the 2018 ballot.
“Tonight’s results are clear — the people of Alabama deemed Roy Moore unfit to serve in the U.S. Senate,” said Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, in a release that read like a victory statement.
“We didn’t just dodge a bullet, we dodged a missile,” added a senior Republican strategist, in an interview with the Washington Examiner, requesting anonymity in order to speak candidly. “If Moore had won, our candidates would have spent the next 11 months being forced to react to every crazy thing he said and did.”
President Trump, and organizations connected to him such as the Republican National Committee, backed Moore, 70, despite allegations of sexual impropriety that included accusations from a woman who said the retired judge molested her decades ago when he was in his 30s and she was 14.
So did Steve Bannon.
The Breitbart News executive chairman, Trump’s former chief strategist, viewed Moore as the linchpin of his plan to fan a populist insurgency against Republican Senate incumbents in 2018 primaries, with the primary goal of ousting Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. R-Ky.
With Moore defeated, McConnell and the broader Republican establishment threatened by Bannon moved quickly to delegitimize the nationalist firebrand and his uprising, blaming his steadfast support for Moore for the loss of a crucial Senate seat in ruby red Alabama, an outcome not seen in decades.
“Steve Bannon managed to do what was previously regarded as absolutely impossible for Senate Democrats,” Josh Holmes, McConnell’s former chief of staff, told the Washington Examiner. “If [Senate Minority Leader] Chuck Schumer [D-N.Y.] doesn’t already have him on the payroll the Dems will be funding Breitbart’s efforts in short order because he’s the best strategist they’ve got.”
Bannon, a brash political brawler, campaigned for Moore several times in Alabama. He had backed the former chief justice of the state supreme court in the special election primary, while McConnell supported appointed Sen. Luther Strange.
The victory in the September primary emboldened Bannon, and he taunted McConnell and other Republican figures, and charged them with betraying Trump and the conservative grassroots, after said they could not endorse Moore because they were troubled by the sexual misconduct allegations.
It turned out to be a significant miscalculation, and Republican insiders aren’t going to let him forget it.
“This is a brutal reminder that candidate quality matters regardless of where you are running,” said Steven Law, who runs McConnell’s super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund. “Not only did Steve Bannon cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country, but he also dragged the President of the United States into his fiasco.”
Added Bruce Haynes, a Republican strategist, in a searing Twitter post:
“Bad night for a lot of people, but mostly for Steve Bannon. He’ll be blamed (rightly so) [for] supporting a terrible, horrible candidate, for poor judgment, awful last-minute comments and for dragging the president into a losing race.”
Jones beat Moore by 1.5 percentage points, winning with nearly 50 percent of the vote.
The result leaves the Republicans with one less vote to work with in the Senate, but avoids the upheaval that might have been caused by a drawn-out Senate Ethics Committee investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore and possibly divisions over how to handle his presence in the Senate.
Bannon was already attempting to blame McConnell and the establishment and their decision to abandon Moore for the loss. The Republican donors he was courting to fund his insurrection will likely see him as diminished and could be less likely to back him.
However, a conservative grassroots might respond differently. These voters are conditioned to distrust Republicans in Congress and might believe Bannon’s claims that a timid Washington unfairly took out Moore because he would have joined Trump in challenging the status quo.
“Mitch McConnell, Senate Leadership Fund, and the Republican Establishment did everything they could to ensure this seat ended up in the hands of a liberal Democrat, and they got their wish,” a source close to Bannon said.
