Controversial firebrand Roy Moore’s primary victory Tuesday over appointed Alabama senator Luther Strange to run for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions wasn’t even close. Moore won the race by nearly 10 points.
One way to view the result is simply to say that all politics are local. Strange was appointed to Sessions’ vacant seat by disgraced then-Gov. Robert Bentley, who was in the middle of a major sex and corruption scandal that led to his resignation. As the state attorney general, Strange called on the Alabama legislature to suspend the impeachment investigation. Strange’s appointment by Bentley was widely perceived as a quid pro quo, and Alabama voters registered their disgust by voting against Strange last night, even in spite of the fact Moore is so right-wing even Alabama Republican voters have reservations.
That’s not the only lens through which to study Strange’s loss. It was another in a long line of tactical errors by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who backed the horse favored by the D.C. establishment, rather than a candidate more amenable to conservative voters.
Political consultant Jordan Gehrke has posted a memo about the race arguing that’s exactly what happened. And not only that, he suggests the imprimatur of support from Mitch McConnell actively makes any Republican senate candidate toxic to the grassroots.
To be perfectly clear, Gehrke is not a disinterested observer of the race. He was involved in running Rep. Mo Brooks’s campaign for the Alabama Senate seat before Trump endorsed Luther Strange, knocking Brooks out of the race last month. After that, Gehrke went to work to elect Roy Moore. Gehrke also claims that “Mitch McConnell and his political team threatened GOP consultants and made clear that any consultant working against Luther Strange would be punished with a loss of business,” including his firm.
However, Gehrke has a valid point about McConnell wasting millions and lots of political capital to elect candidates seem to appeal more to K street than to voters. As I pointed out just before the runoff in Alabama last month:
Notably, Gehrke has experienced McConnell as King-Midas-in-reverse before—he worked on Sasse’s successful campaign, where Sasse defeated a McConnell-backed primary candidate, Shane Osborn. And Strange’s defeat could have been more humiliating than it was. Strange and Books were neck-and-neck for second place in the runoff last month, despite McConnell and the NRSC spending millions on behalf of Strange. Had McConnell not twisted Trump’s arm for a last-minute endorsement of Strange, there’s a not-insignificant chance that Brooks would have knocked Strange out of the running. Still, as outlined by Gehrke, the Brooks campaign’s response to the Trump endorsement is illuminating:
So that’s what Gehrke says they did when he went to work for Moore. This strategy “effectively flipped McConnell and [Senate Leadership Fund’s] attacks so that every time they saw a negative ad attacking Roy Moore, voters understood that these were just more dishonest attacks being paid for by Mitch McConnell and the DC Swamp.” Essentially, it neutralized the Trump endorsement.
Did tying McConnell to Strange work for Moore? Well, at a campaign rally last Friday, this happened:
So President Trump was reduced to denying that a Republican senator knows the Republican Senate majority leader, in spite of the fact a McConnell aligned superPAC had spent $10 million on Strange’s campaign.
Gehrke’s memo goes on to argue that McConnell will be an albatross around the neck of Senate candidates going forward. At Moore’s victory party, no less than Steve Bannon said, “You’re going to see in state, after state, after state, people that follow the model of Judge Moore—that do not need to raise money from the elites, from the crony capitalists, from the fat cats in Washington, D.C.” Note that Bannon recently accused McConnell of “economic hate crimes against working men and women in the heartland of this country,” and said he wears the Senate majority leader’s contempt as a “badge of honor.” If Bannon decides to really go after McConnell, McConnell-backed Senate candidates might go from repellent to radioactive.
And already, insurgent candidates are taking the fight to McConnell. “[The Alabama primary] shows it can be done,” Danny Tarkanian, who is challenging Sen. Dean Heller in Nevada’s GOP primary, told CNN. “It shows the amount of money McConnell and his super PACs put in the race can’t change the feeling that voters have right now.” The GOP Senate is facing other key primary challenges – notably Jeff Flake in Arizona – and a slew of retirement rumors, in addition to the vacancies opened up by Bob Corker in Tennessee and John McCain in Arizona. Unless McConnell develops a more strategic approach and/or lighter touch, we could see a lot of very ugly Republican Senate primaries in the years ahead.
