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Roy Moore's campaign against the political establishment reaches its natural conclusion
The article shows three charts from Moore's lawsuit.
Politics Analysis
Roy Moore’s campaign against the political establishment reaches its natural conclusion
By Philip Bump December 28 at 12:10 PM
Skepticism of the establishment served the Republican Party well for a long time. Framing government, in particular, as wasteful and bloated effectively mobilized Republican voters to support cuts to spending and to focus on slashing taxes. Depicting the electoral system as rife with fraud helped make the case for new voter ID laws that often had the happy side effect of tamping down turnout from Democratic-leaning voters. ... The only problem, made apparent with the advent of the tea party, was that the Republican Party itself was part of the establishment. GOP voters didn’t need much convincing that the corruption in D.C. power structures included Republican leaders themselves, but hyper-conservative media outlets stoked those feelings anyway. That led to a struggle over several election cycles as Republican incumbents fought off outsider challengers often using the weird strategy of ignoring their own records in office.
After the establishment largely subsumed the outsider surge, 2016 happened. An improbable non-politician rose to the forefront thanks to an affection for saying precisely the sorts of things that Republican candidates weren’t supposed to say — but that those partisan media outlets strongly encouraged — and for otherwise thumbing his nose at everything that came before. Donald Trump won the party’s nomination thanks to a core, fervent, anti-establishment base and won the presidency as Republican voters figured that a guy who might conceivably blow up their party was still better than Hillary Clinton.
Outside of that context, the candidacy of Roy Moore to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate takes on a different sheen. A guy twice removed from the state Supreme Court for refusing to uphold judicial mandates is certainly an outsider’s outsider. Had he run for the Senate at a moment when Republicans weren’t embracing outsiders and those willing to challenge norms, however, it’s easy to see how he might not have won the GOP primary at all.
Earlier this month, Moore did something even more unusual for a Republican in Alabama: He lost. Thanks in part to a Democratic voting base motivated by opposition to Moore and Trump and thanks in part, it seems, to revelations that Moore had initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old in 1979, Democrat Doug Jones beat Moore by 1.5 percentage points to earn the right to represent the state in the Senate.
....
Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Post based in New York. Follow @pbump
Roy Moore’s campaign against the political establishment reaches its natural conclusion
By Philip Bump December 28 at 12:10 PM
Skepticism of the establishment served the Republican Party well for a long time. Framing government, in particular, as wasteful and bloated effectively mobilized Republican voters to support cuts to spending and to focus on slashing taxes. Depicting the electoral system as rife with fraud helped make the case for new voter ID laws that often had the happy side effect of tamping down turnout from Democratic-leaning voters. ... The only problem, made apparent with the advent of the tea party, was that the Republican Party itself was part of the establishment. GOP voters didn’t need much convincing that the corruption in D.C. power structures included Republican leaders themselves, but hyper-conservative media outlets stoked those feelings anyway. That led to a struggle over several election cycles as Republican incumbents fought off outsider challengers often using the weird strategy of ignoring their own records in office.
After the establishment largely subsumed the outsider surge, 2016 happened. An improbable non-politician rose to the forefront thanks to an affection for saying precisely the sorts of things that Republican candidates weren’t supposed to say — but that those partisan media outlets strongly encouraged — and for otherwise thumbing his nose at everything that came before. Donald Trump won the party’s nomination thanks to a core, fervent, anti-establishment base and won the presidency as Republican voters figured that a guy who might conceivably blow up their party was still better than Hillary Clinton.
Outside of that context, the candidacy of Roy Moore to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate takes on a different sheen. A guy twice removed from the state Supreme Court for refusing to uphold judicial mandates is certainly an outsider’s outsider. Had he run for the Senate at a moment when Republicans weren’t embracing outsiders and those willing to challenge norms, however, it’s easy to see how he might not have won the GOP primary at all.
Earlier this month, Moore did something even more unusual for a Republican in Alabama: He lost. Thanks in part to a Democratic voting base motivated by opposition to Moore and Trump and thanks in part, it seems, to revelations that Moore had initiated sexual contact with a 14-year-old in 1979, Democrat Doug Jones beat Moore by 1.5 percentage points to earn the right to represent the state in the Senate.
....
Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Post based in New York. Follow @pbump