Alabama Megathread 2: Thou Shall Not Touch Teenage Girls

[Blair]

Leave his ass on the ballot. It would have been bloody murder if Democrats called for moving the goal posts to get out of electing or losing with a problematic candidate. Either vote for the pedophile or don’t. Own it.

The Democrats did it in New Jersey in 2002.  A crook was replaced after the withdrawal period had passed.  What is good for the goose is good for the gander.   It might not work out, but is worth a try from a Republican point of view

As they said on Pod Save America, if New Jersey Democrats are the new moral standard we're ed.

That aside; didn't the polling actually show a Strange WI effort with Moore on the ballot actually doesn't make a big difference?

[Blair]

RNC pulls out

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Interesting that RNC internals had Moore only +2 ahead last week; even if this doesn't move a lot of voters the combination of his poor fundraising, a possible write in, bad media coverage and lack of support can easily get rid of that lead.

Worth noting that IIRC the RNC did this with Akin in 2012; but simply gave money to the Missouri GOP instead

[Blair]

why would you forge a signature of a yearbook when 4 people have already came forward and the evidence you're forging isn't even that groundbreaking?

Surely if they'd forge it they'd make it a bit juicer.

but really Greedo just think what you're actually saying; I hope you're not stupid enough to think that a women would forge a signature on a yearbook from the 70s, to say that a political candidate sexually assaulted her?

Even the vast right wing conspiracy in the 1990s never went that far

[Blair]

I do love the old hits like 'Ted Kennedy is a communist', 'JFK stole Illinois'. I'm still waiting for one about Kennedy SR being a bootlegger

[Blair]

I do love the old hits like 'Ted Kennedy is a communist', 'JFK stole Illinois'. I'm still waiting for one about Kennedy SR being a bootlegger

I hate to feed any fodder to the troll, but isn't that last one actually kind of true?

He got the import rights the moment after prohibition was lifted.

Kennedy's Snr biographer who's relatively critical of him says there's no evidence of it, and that the allegations only came out in the 1970s.

[Blair]

We saw with Trump that major allegations / missteps hurt him for like a week and then Republicans privately forgave him and rallied around his candidacy again. With Moore, there's a risk that when the allegations go out of the news for several days, Republicans let them slip out of their minds as well and start to rationalize supporting him again.

Several key differences between the two scenarios:
 
-The national media shaped a horse race narrative where scandals on both sides were treated equally even when the substance and severity of the scandals were highly disparate. Trump had a ton of scandals that should have sunk any other candidate, but there were so many that each one had a lesser impact by themselves than the gargantuan "email" scandal of Clinton's which was made into a monolith. When Comey's letter was released, the media basically dropped the Access Hollywood tape from the headlines. There is no comparable or even non-comparable scandal engulfing Doug Jones, and no big media outlet clamoring to equivocate the two. It's been non-stop negative coverage at the local and national level of Roy Moore's child molestation allegations, and Jones has utterly dominated the local airwaves, keeping the scandal fresh in voters' minds. Moore is also not nearly as savvy at deflection as Trump is, mostly attacking the media and the accusers while letting Jones less Alabama-representative views (like being pro-choice) fly under the radar for most voters.

-The national Republican party created a permission structure for reluctant rank and file party voters to coalesce around Trump. After the initial round of defections in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape, the RNC circled the wagons and brought everybody back on board out of necessity; they couldn't afford to go into the election leaderless. The GOP leadership despises Moore and feels no similar commitment to helping him win. The national party is no longer fundraising or supporting him and have cut ties, meaning no outside cavalry is coming in to prop him up like they did with Trump at the 11th hour. Those Strange primary voters don't have the same permission structure to embrace Moore set in place the way it was for Trump in 2016, and while most Moore voters don't give a crap what the party leadership does, the ones whose support has been most shaken by the allegations tend to fit the profile of those that are more establishment friendly, and they aren't receiving the necessary cues from GOP leadership to hold their nose and vote Moore.

-As we've seen with the litany of special elections throughout the year, Democrats are energized and turning out in greater numbers than they did during the Obama years. Even in red territory like KS-4, SC-5, Oklahoma legislature, etc., Democrats have significantly outperformed their usual margins and flipped red seats or made the races closer than they had any right to. Demoralization of the incumbent party is a well-attested to phenomenon, and having your party's candidate for the Senate race of your state get slammed with multiple allegations of child molestation isn't exactly the type of thing that helps less enthused voters turn out to the polls. Moore's enthusiastic base might turn out, but given how utterly dependent he was on a smooth turnout operation to win, it's not surprising that the latest round of polls showed a deep drop in his support, which was already underperforming the usual Alabama Republican.

I think people are just overly cynical and keep viewing things from the lens of the last series of elections and are slow to readjust their expectations when the political environment shifts. Moore might very well manage to pull out a victory in the end, but we haven't had any more credible pollsters out in the field in the past week, yet that hasn't stopped people from falling back on a doom and gloom prediction of Jones' inevitable failure because of Alabama's Republican default or because Trump managed to survive his scandal.
 
Jones isn't guaranteed a win, it's an extremely tight race as the most recent polls demonstrated, but I think people are using the wrong roadmaps to try and prognosticate the outcome.

I know it's lazy but this 1000 times.

People need to understand just how damaged the Moore campaign is; Trump's campaign at least brought in enough money to be relatively competitive, and used Trump to inspire a lot of voters, who where then brought in through the various republican infrastructure that had been built in states like Florida, Ohio etc.

I haven't seen any numbers but I can't imagine that Moore is raising enough money (based on his last release) to actually do much. He's got no support from outside Groups, the RNC has cut off money so he's relying solely on online fundraising based on 'Muh Liberal conspiracy'.

The guy almost lost a statewide race in 2012 when Obama was on the ballot. 

[Blair]

I know the polling seems to have dried up (and there's the usual chatter about the magic internals showing something different...) but would I be right to say that the general trend is that Moore isn't going to lose?

I feel like it could be within a 1-3% margin; but even with all the variables, Moore is still going to win.

[Blair]

I guarantee the Moore campaign or Fox won't be running around shouting the word 'sex' at all; especially when it's just a boring process story.

If a canidiate can be accused of sexual assault and still win, then a campaign will survive for taking liberties with a political ad.