༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ DOUG JONES TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ

Thank God that disgusting freak lost. Next step, prison please.

Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!

:)

It was embarrassingly close though, 600,000 people in Alabama voted for a pedo

To be fair, more than that voted for a pedophile a year ago. Alabama's trending the right direction.

zzzzz

McConnell needs to be primaried so bad. Pretty unbelievable that the GOP could be inept enough to lose a Senate seat in Alabama.

DILLY DILLY

PE - didn't McConnell beg Moore not to run because he knew this would happen? Or do you just think his money would've bought votes.

And what the fuck does that say about our "democracy"

McConnell forced Luther Strange (who the Alabama voters didn't want) onto them in the primary stage and then refused to back Moore even before the allegations. McConnell actively chose to lose the seat rather than let a Republican that wasn't his guy, but was his party's voters' choice, hold it.
McConnell has been the Democrats' most effective representative in Washington since Trump got elected.

To be clear, I don't fault him for not backing Moore from the beginning, because Moore is a relatively extreme candidate. I fault him for being inept enough to back the wrong horse in the primary and then fail to back his party's choice at any point after Moore won. Independent of one's opinion on Moore, the fact that a card-carrying Democrat with all of the standard liberal progressive policy platforms got elected in *Alabama* is a scathing indictment on McConnell's leadership. He's got to go.

And here I thought you were mad at McConnell because he let his party run a pedophile.

I think that a dem got elected in Alabama because people realize how fucking shitty the GOP and Donald Trump is.

So you're saying that McConnell not supporting a guy who wanted to get rid of all the Amendments after the 10th, was evicted from his judge position twice (already showing incompetence in office), and spoke with my about the times of slavery.....that makes him a bad Republican? So you're saying Republicans should have no moral backbone? To the party line at all costs? And that's not even going into the child molestation stuff.

Republican senators are celebrating right now. Moore would've been a PR nightmare for the party in 2018, or are you blinded to that? Distancing himself from Moore was the smartest thing McConnell has done.

*spoke wistfully

No, the bulk of my frustration with McConnell as a GOP leader is how the primaries were mismanaged. He could have supported someone like Mo Brooks, who also ran in the Republican primaries, had won office in Alabama three times before, and wasn't a PR nightmare in the making. Instead he backed his empty suit Luther Strange and you see what happened.

**with McConnell in this case, anyway. He's been pretty terrible as a leader before the special election primary

And moreover, I think it's more of an indictment of Moore's irreverence to the party. When your party leadership is saying "don't run, step aside" it's probably for good reason. When your future colleagues are denouncing you, threatening to investigate you and bar you from your seat, that's a sign you shouldn't take the job. Had he won, he'd be a powerless, hated figure in the center and a black stain on the party in upcoming elections.

And you say that's McConnell's fault and not Moore's? That's a laugh. Unless, again, you think it's all about the money.

Oh, I have no idea how the primaries were conducted.

The election tonight is what it is. Moore was obviously a high-risk candidate and the GOP paid the price.
The grotesque mismanagement happened back in the primaries. Moore got a groundswell of support from Alabama voters who felt like the GOP establishment was forcing a representative on them that they didn't want.
Reminds me of how Louisiana got its current Democratic governor, they forced David Vitter on us as the Republican candidate and got burned.

Basically I'm sick of incompetent GOP elites making stupid decisions in their quest to get only their good ole baws into office, at the expense of the people they're supposed to represent.

I can't +1 this thread enough. we need people who are on some basic level good people. child molestation = someone not fit for office.

even if you are APPALLED by Doug jones, I'd rather see even Karl Marx in one damn senate seat before a child molester.

hopefully there's a bigger cleaning of house to come, word from the grapevine says washpo has a list of names in the dozens in gov't, and it should be coming out soon

nd: karl marx was a child molester

Maybe the problem is with the people who VOTE Republican, not the Republican leadership.

That's how we got Trump and almost got Moore.

I don’t usually wade into these conversations but seriously guys. An election was had and the fault of this election falls on the republican base, who voted for this candidate in the primary. It’s not anyone in the parties fault but the combination of all of their stubbornness that cost them this election. If the Republican Party was truly invested in trying here they would have put the money behind Strange after the Moore allegations came out and entered him as a write in. They definitely would have lost but they would have saved face. The fact that they WILLINGLY supported a racist pedophile “judge” who doesn’t understand our constitution; says more about the party than they’d like to admit. The fact that it was even a question that needed to be asked of other Republicans if they support him is atrocious. I am by NO means a Democrat or a liberal, and even I’m disappointed in the Republican Party.

I mean it's stupidity AND vileness. they could have arranged a write in campaign a month ago, but they stuck with him. half of them went into conspiracy land and the other hand said 'so what'

fortunately enough told him to fuck off so that he didn't win it in the end

Ramrodding your force-fed candidate the voters already rejected would have been a complete disaster. That wasn't and never was going to be the answer.

Y'all are so eager to gloat or make parsimonious declarations that you don't even bother to try to understand the underlying causes of why bizarre and unexpected things happen.

A child molester is the answer instead?

There *wasn't* a good answer at that point. The choice was between running with the candidate your base elected, which had a slew of problems which everyone already knows, or rig your primaries so your guy got in, destroy voter trust and turnout for years and still lose.
Everything was bad the moment the primary runoff was between Strange and Moore, and the fault for that lies with GOP leadership for pushing Strange when he was obviously not going to get it done.

The problem is that a child molester just ran and got 600,000 votes for office. The rest is just politics.