Ross Douthat – The New York Times:
No, there will be no course correction — only the Trump we’ve seen so far, the Trump who would rather have the G.O.P. fall in ruins around him than give up on his feuds and insults and absurd behavior, the Trump who made Senator Doug Jones our strange reality, and the Trump who is also responsible for the larger wave that’s building, building, for next fall.
In a rational world Doug Jones would have won by a twenty-point margin. That’s the rejection Roy Moore earned. But his was an Alabama race, in a state and a region that has eschewed Democrats since that party pivoted and replaced the GOP as the vanguard of civil rights. The last Democrat to win a Senate seat from there changed parties two years later, becoming a Republican.
Last night’s victory wasn’t rational. It was revulsional. It was a rejection by many of a candidacy by an accused child molester, an embrace by just enough of Senator Richard Shelby’s advocacy to conservatives to write-in a third candidate on their ballot, a recognition that, for all the latter-day voter suppression that has arisen in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 abandonment of federal Voter Rights Act oversight in Alabama, black and brown people’s votes not only count, but can carry the day. And they did.
Good for Alabama, good for America.
#GOP #Alabama #ALSen #RoyMoore #DougJones #Trump
A Random Stroll 