'This Is What the Death of a Party Looks Like'

[DonViejo]

December 13, 2017 at 9:56 am EST By Taegan Goddard

It’s true that Roy Moore was an awful candidate. He might have been one of the worst Senate candidates in our lifetimes. But he wasn’t a mistake.

Republican leaders were confident that Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL) — who was appointed to the seat by disgraced Gov. Robert Bentley (R-AL) in an effort to stop an ethics investigation — could defeat Moore in a GOP primary. They directed financial support to Strange and even got President Trump to campaign for him in an effort to sideline the third candidate, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), in the primary.

Moore won easily. It was a bad gamble that showed a complete lack of understanding of the Republican party’s base today.

The Alabama Senate seat is now the sixth that Republicans have lost since 2010 where deeply-flawed candidates prevailed in contested primaries only to lose in the general election. One time is a mistake, but six times is a clear trend.

The Washington Post quotes Josh Holmes, a former top aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY):

It should be a hurricane siren for every Republican. This is what the death of a party looks like, and without an immediate course correction and rejection of the Steve Bannon view of the world, you can lose races in states like Alabama…

If I had the top five Republican minds in politics and we spent three months attempting to conceive of a way to lose an Alabama Senate race, I’m not sure that we could come up with it. You could literally take any name out of a phone book except Roy Moore’s and win by double digits. And we managed to get the only guy in Alabama that could lose to a Democrat.

It wasn’t a mistake.

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https://politicalwire.com/2017/12/13/death-party-looks-like/

[Willie Pep]

1. Republicans do have a "kook" problem especially with regard to primaries.

But the GOP is nowhere close to being dead or dying. Primaries select for extremism because so few people vote in primaries that they sometimes produce bad general election candidates like Roy Moore.

The Republicans will have to work on developing better candidates which I think they will. Guys like Paul Ryan and Mike Pence are scarier than Trump and Moore because they have a veneer of respectability but promote most of the same horrible policies.

[GeorgeGist]

2. Death Party ...

has only just begun.