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Let me see if I understand.
It’s Mitch McConnell‘s fault that Moe Brooks and his supporters chose to endorse the distasteful Roy Moore in the primary???
Actually, yes. Having run GOP primaries for a living back in the day, it’s not uncommon for the supporters of the candidate who got pounded by one guy to jump on the bandwagon of the guy who DIDN’T pound them, to exact their revenge. When McConnell decided to nuke Brooks, he created a bunch of anti-Strange voters.
Were the Brooks voters doing the right thing? No. Was it smart to go full negative against Brooks in the first place? No. If “Stupid” were an energy source, this GOP race could power every home in Alabama for a year.
Or … primary voters were very stupid. Why didn’t they bother with a little research on the candidates instead of all this “well, I’m voting for X because Y is McConnell’s man” nonsense. And why, if they wanted to poke a stick in McConnell’s eye, didn’t they turn out to vote for Brooks in the primary? Much as it pains me to say it, I believe that too many Alabama primary voters simply liked the anti gay and anti Muslim crap that came out of Moore’s mouth.
Because they’re normal people. Most people don’t like politics enough to do anything other than passively absorbing information about politics from other sources – general interest news, chitchat & entertainment. Even primary voters don’t usually do research but seek out a bit of partisan media.
Political junkies are outliers.
Well any at all is too many, but I’d be surprised if there’s more than 25% of AL-GOP primary voters in that category. The ‘1-2’ punch of McConnell in the first stage and Bannon in the second grew that into a majority.
Yay! Now we agree. I didn’t like it yesterday when you said you blamed ‘stupid voters.’ I think that first McConnell and Bannon are responsible and after that the voters – because all did dumb things, but the first two are supposed to be professionals. Of course, above everything else, it’s Moore’s fault for being the sort of scumbag who’d assault a 16-year old and have unlawful sexual contact with a 14-year-old.
I still think ‘elect & eject’ would have been the better outcome, but I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.
re: “you want your Mitch McConnell bashing” – Not me. I just think he deserves some of the blame. I feel about him the same way I feel about Trump: I’m grateful for Gorsuch and for slaying the pantsuit monster, but I wish they were both doing a better job. Trump would do better if he were more disciplined,. Conversely, McConnell seems to me to be too focused on playing it safe.
re: 22,810 -“I’m trying to stay on board… I will not accept just any candidate you try to shove down my throat.” – Of course that last bit applies not just to write-ins rejecting Moore in the general, but people in the primary who thought Strange was tainted and too milquetoast. If I’d magically been made majority leader for a day, I’d have tried to craft a message to appeal to those 23k voters: “If you’re worried about the allegations against Moore, we’ll conduct an investigation and you can trust that we will get at the truth. ‘Listen & Believe’ is a nice slogan, but we intend to conduct formal proceedings because that’s how Republicans believe justice is served.”
Of course, that is a tiny bit deceptive because just like with impeachment, it’s ultimately a political matter and not a criminal one. It’d serve three purposes though:
What could show that they’re serious about these issues better than invoking a procedure that hasn’t been used in 150 years?! That technically isn’t true. It just hasn’t been used successfully in .that long. It was invoked six years ago, but ‘150 years’ is dramatic and memorable.
By the way, how did you go from stand-up to primary campaigns (or was it the other way ’round)? That might be a story for the podcast some time.