Trump turns on Republicans after shock Alabama defeat
UNITED STATES: The loss of what should have been a safe Republican Senate seat in Alabama laid bare the depth of division within President Donald Trump’s party as voters in the conservative south dealt him his most serious political setback yet.
Doug Jones, a lawyer and newcomer to politics, was the first Democrat to win an Alabama Senate race in 25 years, cutting the Republicans’ majority in the chamber to a single vote.
The shock result set Republicans against each other, with Trump attacking his party for not backing its candidate. ‘‘I wish we would’ve gotten the seat,’’ he said. ‘‘A lot of Republicans feel differently, they’re very happy with the way it turned out. As the leader of the party, I would have liked to have had the seat.’’
Jones, 63, was lifted to victory by a high African-American turnout in a state that Trump won by 28 percentage points last year. He also benefited from affluent whites and young voters abandoning his Republican rival, Roy Moore, whose campaign was upended by allegations that he had molested teenage girls in the 1970s.
Ed Rollins, a senior adviser to a pro-Trump campaign group, said that the Republicans urgently had to reconcile their feuding establishment and populist wings. ‘‘Everyone is going to start panicking,’’ he predicted.
Allies of Steve Bannon, the nationalist former Trump campaign chief who had backed Moore, blamed the loss on the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill, many of whom had effectively excommunicated Moore. ‘‘The Republican establishment got exactly what it wanted,’’ said Corey Stewart, a prominent Virginia politician. ‘‘It wanted to defeat a pro-Trump candidate like Judge Moore.’’
The anti-Trump faction of the party savoured the moment. Jeff Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona who donated US$100 to Jones, tweeted: ‘‘Decency wins.’’
Trump claimed on Twitter to have predicted that Moore, a former judge who had campaigned as a devout evangelical Christian, would lose. ‘‘I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!’’ he wrote.
However, exit polls suggested that as many Alabama voters disapproved of Trump as approved of him; a sobering finding for the president in what is supposed to be his heartland.
Jones, speaking to a crowd of ecstatic supporters on election night in the city of Birmingham, thanked Alabama for refusing to take ‘‘the wrong fork’’ at a political and moral crossroads. ‘‘This entire race has been about dignity and respect,’’ he said. ‘‘This campaign has been about the rule of law.’’
The Democrats have now won each of the three statewide elections contested this year, lifting their hopes of seizing control of the House of Representatives - and possibly even the Senate - in the midterm elections in November next year.
Moore’s lead in the polls had collapsed after he was accused of molesting a 14-year-old schoolgirl in 1979 when he was 32. Scenting blood, Jones’s supporters poured US$10 million into his campaign in October and November - five times as much as Moore raised.
Trump chose to gamble, risking the aura of political savvy he acquired after his own shock election win. Without consulting his advisers he went all in for Moore, holding a rally barely 40km from the Alabama state border on Saturday and urging his 40 million Twitter followers to back the former judge.
Maintaining the Republican majority in the Senate had been, it seemed, Trump’s priority. ‘‘Roy Moore will always vote with us,’’ he tweeted on the eve of the election. Ultimately, though, his endorsement could not overcome the distaste many in his party felt for Moore’s campaign: more than 20,000 voters declined to back anybody on the ballot and wrote in another name instead.
That amounted to about 1.7 per cent of the electorate. Jones won by 1.5 per cent.
In 2016 there had been fewer than 4000 write-in ballots when the state’s other senator, the Republican Richard Shelby, cruised home by 28 points.
Some 96 per cent of AfricanAmericans voters backed Jones, according to an exit poll for The Washington Post. That matched Barack Obama’s performance with black voters in 2012, but Jones also won 30 per cent of the white vote, twice the proportion that Obama did.
Large numbers of the white rural voters who backed Trump last year stayed at home.
The Alabama result was the latest of several to sow panic among the Republicans. In April the Democrats were the most competitive they have been in years in special congressional elections in Georgia and Kansas; in November they won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, where the nine-point winning margin was the largest by a Democrat in the swing state for more than 30 years. Recent polls show the Democrats leading by about ten percentage points when voters are asked which party they would prefer to hold Congress, and Trump’s approval rating is languishing at about 35 per cent. Those are possible indications that a ‘‘wave’’ midterm election is forming that would threaten the Republican majorities on Capitol Hill next year.
The Alabama contest had also been a test of the credibility of Bannon, the former Trump campaign chief who is trying to fashion a new role for himself as a nationalist Svengali. He has hopes of running populist challengers against a host of incumbent Republican senators in next year’s midterm elections but his many opponents within the party will now paint him as an electoral liability, capable of losing even in the Republican heartland.
Trump has struggled to pass significant legislation, and the Republicans’ majority in the Senate is now down to a single vote.
The party leadership remains optimistic that it will be able to pass tax cuts in the coming weeks, saying yesterday that the House and Senate had made good progress in reconciling their different versions of the legislation. However, their hopes of then moving on to welfare reform have taken a blow.
Even so, some Republicans felt that with Moore’s defeat they had dodged a bullet. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator, had warned that a win by the former judge would haunt his party for years.
The result hinted, perhaps, at the limits of tolerance for firebrand politics. Mr Moore had said, among other things, that he did not believe that Barack Obama was born in the US and that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress. When recently asked on the campaign trail when America was last ‘‘great’’ he evoked the time before the Civil War, when slavery was legal.
Controversial until the bitter end, he declined to concede defeat on election night. ‘‘Realise that when the vote is this close that it’s not over,’’ he told a crowd of crestfallen supporters. ‘‘We also know that God is always in control.’’
Under Alabama law, a recount occurs automatically if an election is won by less than 0.5 per cent. Jones’s victory exceeded that margin and the Alabama Secretary of State, John Merrill, who would oversee the process, told CNN that it was ‘‘highly unlikely’’ that a recount would change the outcome.
A recount in a Minnesota senate election in 2008 cost the state’s counties an estimate US$460,000, according to the Pew Trust. However, it was not clear that Mr Moore had the legal right to demand a recount, even if he were willing to pay for it himself.
He has denied all allegations against him.
A CNN exit poll showed that 49 per cent of voters thought that the claims were true; 45 per cent thought they were false.
– The Times the