I do not think I will ever trust polls again. Defying almost all the polls, Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore yesterday to win the special election to fill the Alabama Senate seat. Jones, a liberal pro-abort, will hold the seat until 2020 when he will be up for re-election. Jones won by a 14,000 vote margin, far too large I think to be overturned in a recount, unless fraud on a massive scale occurred. I did find it very interesting, and suspicious, last night that the votes from the two Democrat strongholds of Montgomery and Birmingham were quite late in being reported. It reminded me of many an election night in Illinois in close state wide races, when, for some mysterious reason, the Chicago vote was very slow being reported. Having said that, I do not expect that the election results will change.
The much ballyhooed write in effort yielded slightly over one percent of the vote total and was not a significant factor, unless one assumes that these voters would have voted for Moore, rather than stayed home or voted for Jones, which I do not. The outcome hinged on the simple fact that a lot of Republicans stayed home and a few voted for Jones. To add perspective to this, in November 2016 Trump clobbered Clinton with a 28 point margin and a total vote margin of 1.3 million to around 729k for Clinton. Jones got fewer votes than Clinton did and Moore got about half of the votes that Trump did. A huge number of Republicans were MIA.
Doubtless there will be attempts to hang this defeat around the neck of Trump, which is absurd. This was all about Moore. Absent the scandals he would have prevailed, probably with about the same 4 point margin of victory that he enjoyed in his last state wide race in 2012.
Almost all of the polls completely missed what was coming, and in close races the polls seem to be currently about as predictive as tossing a coin, or looking at chicken entrails.
“Absent the scandals he would have prevailed,”
With the scandals, he almost did. It wasn’t exactly a landslide.
MSNBC and CNN were both parroting this morning that this was a “defeat for Trump and a new coalition had arisen.”
Really? If Moore’s scandal had come to light during the primary, Luther Strange would have been Senator.
As I said in a comment on another post, I’m very sad that Moore lost and that a pro-abortion Democrat will go to the Senate. It’s likely that Luther Strange would have won, and I believe this election shows the pernicious effects of Bannon’s meddling on Republican party governing.
Another point: polls are only accurate to within a margin of error, and unless the sampled population is very large, this is usually a 2 or 3 % error. Moreover, it may be the case that people are ashamed or unwilling to give their true intentions to a pollster, or maybe they haven’t made up their minds until that last minute in the poll booth.
Finally, it seems time that campaign rules change. Outside money sources eliminated and replaced by public funding, campaign times shortened. Perhaps the libel laws should also be changed–I don’t think that would damage freedom of the press. Would Roy Moore have a libel case against the women who may have lied about their experiences? (As my wife has remarked, why is it to be assumed automatically that what any woman says about her past is true? Democrats certainly didn’t do so for Bill Clinton.)
” I did find it very interesting, and suspicious, last night that the votes from the two Democrat strongholds of Montgomery and Birmingham were quite late in being reported” That’s the way it is in Northern Virginia with two populous counties and a city, Checking to see how many votes needed to put the liberal Dem over the top to victory.
I’m angry this morning. The election of Jones has empowered the DNC. They will use the slander/libel tactic over and over again. As I predicted elsewhere on TAC the Dems were willing to sacrifice Franken and the elderly Conyers because it’s no loss; those states will elect liberal Dem replacements. We are already seeing them claiming the moral high ground in this hazy sexual harassment/assault mess and with Jones’ win will go after Trump big time using the same MO. Of course the medial as usual is complicit.
I despise McConnell and all the other Republican elected who forgot about “innocent until proven guilty” and said they would refuse to seat a duly elected official. They fell into the Dem’s trap. Nikki Haley’s announcement wasn’t a help either.
Jones is a pro-abort and I feel that the Evil One has been victorious.
Cam-That alleged moral high ground is a large mesa and standing shoulder to shoulder with the democrats there are JFK, LBJ, Conyers, Franken, etc etc. and, elevated above all there, Billy Boy of Bimbo fame. Moore should have had reprinted Gloria Steinem’s defense of Billy Boy and he should have hired Hillary Hit Squad Clinton to destroy the bimbos accusing him.
I come almost always from a prolife viewpoint – vomit prodeath RINOs out of my mouth. The only good I see is that this will galvanize the prolife millions and get them out on the battlelines-as they have so often done since Roe- for the 2018 elections. [John McCain-covered in vomit]
Guy McClung, Texas
How long will Jones last? If half of Trump’s voters stayed home and all the Dems showed up, does this mean in two years with a more palatable candidate the GOP will retake the seat?
See 538. The polls were all over the place. The margin was slender enough that it’s a reasonable inference that if the Capitol Hill fredocons had simply declined to comment on the charges against Moore and not turned off financial pipelines, he’d have won.
If you look at the vote count Moore lost by a little less than 20,000 votes. There were 21000+ write-in votes (for, presumably, the last minute “Republican” alternative). Do the arithmetic.
I don’t imagine that helped. It was a rerun of the Todd Akin affair: Capitol Hill Republicans take a challenging situation and make it worse. I’m not understanding how the direction of the congressional Republican caucuses has landed in the laps of such a pair of inadequates as Addison Mitchell McConnell and Paul Ryan. They don’t seem to be any good at parliamentary procedure or policy development or public relations (or, to be more precise, pr skills above and beyond what’s necessary to get their candyasses elected again and again).
Ken, Jones is a senator. Which means it’s going to be 6 years before he’s voted on again, not 2.
I’m still uncertain whether J.Joan is an AI or not. Does a human fail the turing test if it convinces the tester they’re a computer?
Oops, I forgot. Special election, only half a term. My bad, Ken, my bad.
[McConell and Ryan] fell into the Dem’s trap
More like helped them build it, set it, and then jumped into it wholeheartedly. They are worse than RINOs, they are Dems in RINO clothing.
“Ken, Jones is a senator. Which means it’s going to be 6 years before he’s voted on again, not 2.”
He is filling out the term of Sessions, the current Attorney General. The voters will have another crack at him in 2020 when Trump is running for re-election. Jones better not enter into any long term leases in DC.
Capitol Hill Republicans take a challenging situation and make it worse.
No kidding. It’s reached the point that the best way for a Republican like me to demonstrate what a good Republican I am is by not voting for Republicans.
Forget the Stupid Party vs. the Evil Party nonsense. It’s the Contemptible Party vs. the Despicable Party these days.
More like helped them build it, set it, and then jumped into it wholeheartedly.
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Not sure there’s direct evidence of that. Could be just the usual flat-footednesss of that crew. I realize John McCain is given to impetuous and prima donna behavior, but that doesn’t describe McConnell, who seems like an animated cadaver much of the time. I cannot figure why they didn’t just ignore press inquiries. It’s not as if they had any reliable information on Moore’s past.
It’s reached the point that the best way for a Republican like me to demonstrate what a good Republican I am is by not voting for Republicans.
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I have the impression that they’re not adaptable and just do what they’ve been doing their whole career and that they cannot respond to problems they’re having with their base and really do not care to. The House majority leader got knocked out in a primary on the immigration issue (by a candidate he outspent by more than 10-to-1). North of 70% of the vote in the Republican presidential contests went to people they had no relationship with (or people they despise). Jeb! went and made a bonfire with a 9-digit sum of donor money. The Republican candidate for President wins while being episodically cut up by the Speaker of the House, the previous Republican nominee, and the patriarch of the Bush clan (who were not heard from even during the BO administration’s most egregious episodes). Observable behavioral change by the Capitol Hill nexus is zero.
There are a number of legitimate ways to interpret the GOP rank-and-file decision to sit this election out. The short of it is that Moore was a lousy candidate with vulnerabilities.
Folks rejected the Roy Moore that outside interests were able to caricature and one of the things that interests me is that that choice seems inherently principled to me. It may have been mistaken, a response to a fiction, but it strikes me as a good response, based upon the information available to them.
Roy Moore sure seems like a hypocritically lewd and morally reprobate figure. Rejecting that caricature seems good to me, even if, in the final analysis, it turns out to be wrong.
It is that which intrigued me since it points to a winning strategy for Progressives.
It seems to me that Progressives merely have to make Libertarian and Conservative figures SEEM bad for us to withdraw our support. We are fundamentally decent folks and the 24 hour news cycle means appearances are enough, since we can’t get actual answers. Parade a reasonably credible victim in front of a good woman and she will shrink from the likely guilty one.
The opposite just won’t work. New York Progressives will happily vote for a lewd, awful person, even when proved to be so. Power is just far more important to them than character.
It takes a relatively small number of folks staying home to sink a Roy Moore, just 21,000.
I expect we will see more and more of this because it seems like it works.
This was bound to be a neck-and-neck race whose results depended on turnout. That’s the toughest thing for a poll to ferret out.
As for Moore’s loss, good riddance. This is an albatross that we didn’t need around our necks. If we lose the Senate in part because of this election, we’d still be better off. As it is, we’ll have enough trouble recovering from nearly electing an accused child-molester. Seriously, that’s what he was accused of. We’re so conditioned to defend “our own” when they’re accuse of something that I don’t think it sunk in. Multiple credible accusations of sexually pursuing girls in their teens.
“Multiple credible accusations of sexually pursuing girls in their teens.”
As long as they were legal I doubt if society in general had much of a problem with it till the day before yesterday historically. Jerry Seinfeld, in his late thirties, was dating a 17 year old back in the nineties and I totally missed all the outrage over that. I regard all the other charges against Moore as likely spurious. If they were real they would have been thrown against him in his prior campaigns, and the two women making the allegations appear to me to be truth deprived to put it politely. The idea that the GOP was at fault in having Moore as a candidate is risible. He won the nomination before any charges were made and he refused to step down as a candidate. Republican reluctance to vote for him defeated him. How any of this reflects badly on the GOP eludes me.
Seriously, it’s like you barely avoided skidding off a cliff and you’re complaining about surviving it. I don’t know if you’re mis-diagnosing the zeitgeist or what, but there’s a real danger that the Dems are going to be seen as the morally superior party by the persuadable middle. They’re always going to be seen as more compassionate, but between the Hillary scandals and the general disgust at antifa-type riots, we were gaining ground. If we’d made it through the campaign without Moore getting any national party support we could have only taken a minor beating. Trump and the RNC embracing Moore at the last minute makes them look horrible, so we get a little worse beating but still, we’re not going to have to spend the next four years defending all of Moore’s statements and alleged predatorial acts. If Moore won, we’d lose the Senate next year. So a Moore victory would have been bad both morally and politically, both short-term and long-term.
The character-assassination of Moore and the feckless message-lessness of Doug Jones could be the Pyhrric victory of the decade.
What could Jones run on? More killing of babies in the womb? More mass illegal immigration? More unvetted and potentially dangerous immigrants on a crazy visa lottery program, candidates originating from countries known to be highly associated with terrorism? More gun control? A bigger federal government and higher taxes?
Hardly. All Dementiacrats can now do is orchestrate an assassination of the opponent: they have no content to their message that they can honestly present at all.
Bring on the weeping accusers.
Seriously, it’s like you barely avoided skidding off a cliff and you’re complaining about surviving it. I don’t know if you’re mis-diagnosing the zeitgeist or what, but there’s a real danger that the Dems are going to be seen as the morally superior party by the persuadable middle.
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You shouldn’t allow yourself to be motivated by cock-and-bull cooked up by the Washington Post.
“I don’t know if you’re mis-diagnosing the zeitgeist”
Rather pointing out that the dating of legal female teenagers by older men in their thirties was rarely a matter of mass pearl-clutching angst until Roy Moore. The campaign against Moore, who I viewed as a badly flawed candidate in many ways, reached new lows for intellectual dishonesty, mob mentality and rampant hypocrisy, especially coming from Democrats who just last year backed the Enabler in Chief Clinton for the highest office in the land.
Democrats have never had a problem with being hypocritical, or denying the law of non-contradiction (assuming they even know it). Republicans (at least the base), on the other hand, are a little more squeamish about these things. I think Pinky’s point is that the integrity of the rank-and-file GOP base can be used against them. Sure, Dems don’t give a crap about how morally despicable their candidate is – in fact, it appears the more despicable the more they like it. Dems don’t care about Seinfeld dating a 17 year old in his 30s; GOP base do. The fact it was legal makes no difference, it’s still creepy. To my knowledge, Moore did not deny dating these girls. Even if he was a perfect gentleman with them, it’s still creepy. Would you want your 17 year old daughter dating a 35 year old? Now, if instead of playing the “it was legal” card he had said something to the effect that he realizes now it was bad judgment, and has repented, that was 30 years ago, etc., maybe things would have turned out differently. Who knows?
Although, I have to say, if there is a silver lining in this, it is: The next GOP candidate will have to have some pretty egregious skeletons in the closet for smears to get real traction.
“Would you want your 17 year old daughter dating a 35 year old?”
No, although I suspect my late grandmother Thelma McClarey would have disagreed with me as she was married at 15 and had her first child at that age in 1927. Her 19 year old husband, my paternal grandfather, and she stayed together until his death in 1973. When it comes to dating legal teenage girls by older men we seem to be dealing with fashion rather than morality.
Dems don’t care about Seinfeld dating a 17 year old in his 30s; GOP base do. The fact it was legal makes no difference, it’s still creepy.
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The use of terminology indigenous to the world of suburban teenagers should be a red flag to you that you’ve confounded taste with morals.
If we lose the Senate in part because of this election, we’d still be better off.
Because it’s always better to powerless in the minority than powerless in the majority.
And Roy Moore dating (allegedly) 17 year-olds doesn’t even register on the Kennedy—Dodd—Clinton scale of sexual impropriety.
Yes, I know Roy Moore isn’t a Catholic, nor likely were his old girlfriends, nevertheless…………………..Article 1083.1 of the Code of Canon Law states:
“A man before he has completed his sixteenth year of age and a woman before she has completed her fourteenth year of age cannot enter into a valid marriage.”
There is NO prohibition on a 30 year old man dating a 14 year old woman. None. Zero. Zip point squat.
There is also NO prohibition on a 30 year old woman dating a 16 year old man (but she is forbidden from dating a 14 year old because that is beneath the age of consent for marriage). None. Zero. Zip point squat.
Now IF man harassed a woman sexually or otherwise, OR committed fornication with a woman, THEN regardless of any age difference he would have done wrong.
The converse is also true: IF a woman harassed a man sexually or otherwise, OR committed fornication with a man, THEN regardless of any age difference she would have done wrong.
But IF an older man dated a younger woman or an older woman dated a younger man, THEN we get to shut our mouths AND stop slandering.
All that said, I think 30 year old men dating 14 year old women or 30 year old women dating 16 year old men is ill-advised and should not be done. But there is a difference between what I think is socially acceptable and normal, and what is actually permissible. Not everything permissible may be acceptable or normal. God knows as a submarine sailor I did many things abnormal, unacceptable and impermissible. IF I ran for office, THEN all these sins would be publicized, hence Roy Moore’s election loss.
The irony though is this: a slim majority of Alabama voters preferred a self-confessed baby murdering sodomy sanctifier as their US Senator instead of a man accused of pedophilia (or is that hebephilia?) without concrete proof. I wonder how given that they can possibly feel morally self-righteous now.
Would you want your 17 year old daughter dating a 35 year old?
Do you make your choices as a parent based on “but people 40 years from now might think it’s creepy”?
I wouldn’t let my kid get married less than a month after meeting someone for the first time, either. Didn’t stop my grandfather’s best friend; grandparents took it really slow– took almost four months from the day he rolled into town before they were married. Both of those ended in natural death by old age, BTW, and were quite fruitful.
I’m much more willing to consider that multiple parents might have a better grasp of the situation than I do, 40 years later, especially since they weren’t letting their theoretical daughter date a theoretical 30+ year old, they were letting their ACTUAL daughters date a specific guy.
It would be interesting to see how many of the folks having vapors over Moore had no issues with Dough Hutchinson marrying a teenager….
No offense, CMatt, but I have to wonder how naive are you? Romney was as squeaky clean as I think any politician will ever be (except maybe Ben Sasse) and that didn’t stop people from just outright inventing smears to hit him with.
That’s what a lot of people seem to be missing with Trump and now Moore. The rank and file conservatives are starting to realize that it doesn’t matter. Jesus Himself could show up and run for office and the media will invent stories to run about Him if they can’t find anything actual (heck we see that nowadays with the whole “had a mistress” charge).
Not that I’m a Moore supporter, I just notice that the Left is playing with loaded premises, and then the Right keeps following them and wondering why they lose. i.e. Where were the memes that all the charges about Moore were while he was a democrat, but now that he’s a republican we believe he’ll behave?