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| This helps Roy Moore |
Democrats should stay the heck out of Alabama.
Don't sent "Freedom Riders." Don't send "Clean for Gene" college students. Keep the SuperPACs away. Nothing printed in the Washington Post or New York Times will help. Nothing McConnell says does any good.
Stay away.
Roy Moore is in trouble, but he could easily win this election. It would be a vindication. The people of Alabama, knowing all the facts, might well choose to be represented in the U. S. Senate by Moore.
That would be the political judge and jury.
White evangelical voters have made their political decision. They render onto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. They do not demand virtue from their political favorites. Notwithstanding the Access Hollywood recording, they supported Trump. Notwithstanding "Two Corinthians", they supported Trump. Trump would appoint an anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-environmentalist to the Supreme Court and that was enough.
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| Clean for Gene: don't bother. Stay out. |
Same with Roy Moore. White evangelicals avert their eyes at personal sin and look at the potential vote in the Senate. Moore will vote correctly; the Democrat won't. They will render onto Caesar their workaday temporal vote. Besides, sometimes God works through very flawed men. Virtue is for church; voting is for who will do the job you want done.
Evangelicals have it figured out. White ones will vote for Roy Moore, and some 31% of the electorate in Alabama are white evangelicals, a big plurality are rural, a big percentage did not finish college, and a huge percentage are Republicans. It is a political fortress.
Roy Moore has one other great electoral foundation: he has outside enemies. An ongoing theme of this blog is that politics in America is tribal. Voters know what tribe they are in in part by who they know to be the rival team. Ones opponents help define your group.
The rival team for white rural evangelicals are the people who communicate that they think white rural evangelicals are hicks. Alabama voters think they are subject to ridicule for speaking in tongues, for believing in full immersion baptism, for spanking their children in public, for being racist, for talking with an Alabama accent, for being patriotic, for being relatively poor, for their daughters marrying early and as virgins, for being who they are.
The strongest argument that Roy Moore has is that outsiders--outsiders who sneer--are trying to tell Alabamans what to do.
3 comments:
The GOP wants Moore to step aside. They don't want him to win. A write in Republican sympathetic to Moore would likely win. The Democrat might win, but they don't want to risk losing. It's a red state.
My bet.
Moore stays in. Wins.
Ball in Senate's court.
They choke.
Saying that it's difficult to know whether Moore will defy everyone, take the heat and stay in, but it will mean he doesn't care about the party, which will suffer with his election. Shades of Trump.
For the record, rural Oregon is not more enlightened than rural Alabama. Their blue strongholds are Birmingham and Montgomery, ours are Portland and Eugene. For those with strong anti-abortion religious beliefs, any pro-life Republican no matter his or her personal faults must be selected over a fetus killing Democrat. So it is in rural Alabama or rural Oregon.
I agree with everyone and everything said: the blog and the comments. Well almost--a write-in would likely split the vote on the right giving a slight advantage to Jones over his existing numbers. But would that be enough? Oh, one other thing I would quibble with: there's a difference between Trump (inappropriate groping) and Moore (pedephilia) and voters would make that distinction anywhere.
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