The GOP must address problems with candidates like Moore

This week, Alabama voters elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in a generation.

That is a sentence no one would have anticipated reading, or writing, a year ago. Alabama is such a deep-red state it makes Texas look temperate, if not conciliatory. In 2016, Donald Trump carried its electoral votes by a 28-point margin. And just a few months ago, Alabama Republicans nominated Roy Moore to be their candidate in the special election for the seat once held by Jeff Sessions, who had been tapped to lead the Department of Justice as Trump’s attorney general.

Voters who weighed in during the primary had respectable options, including Rep. Mo Brooks and the incumbent, Luther Strange, who had been appointed by the governor to serve as Sessions’ replacement. The fact that they chose Moore was suggestive. His public record is notable, primarily, for being overtly contentious.

Moore believes that homosexuality should be illegal, for example, and that Muslims should be barred from serving in Congress. He was twice elected Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, in 2001 and 2013, but never managed to serve a full term in that capacity before being removed from office.

“We have to return the knowledge of God and the Constitution of the United States to the United States Congress,” he said at his victory party on Sept. 26, after clinching the nomination by beating Strange in a runoff.

Why Moore therefore wanted Alabamians to vote for him was a mystery — one that only deepened over the next 10 weeks, as decent people all over the country recoiled at allegations that he had sexually assaulted a number of teenage girls, and the revelation that, in Moore’s opinion, the last time America was great was the antebellum era, “even though we had slavery.”

In any case, Doug Jones, a for-

mer U.S. attorney, narrowly edged past him Tuesday in the general election.

In keeping with his habit of believing himself to be above the law, Moore has yet to concede the election. Regardless, he lost it. And his defeat will have practical consequences. Republicans will still control the Senate after Jones is seated, but by the narrowest possible margin.

“Take this opportunity, in light of this election, and go ahead and fund that CHIP program before I get up there,” said Jones, at his own victory party Tuesday night, referring to the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Still, many Republicans are relieved by Moore’s defeat, and all of them should be. Disregard of principles

Most of them had cottoned on to the fact that for Moore to win would be a mixed blessing, at best, for the conservative cause. He would, perhaps, have been a reliable vote for tax reform, or anything else that might be on the president’s somewhat inchoate agenda. At the same time, Moore has a record of brazen disregard for core principles such as rule of law and due process. Multiple women have described him, credibly, as a sexual predator. And he embarrasses himself on alarmingly casual basis, as he did on election day, when he tried to ride a horse to the polling station.

The man is a bad apple, clearly. Most Republicans could see that. Their party nearly sent him to the Senate anyway.

It’s true that a handful of Republican leaders disavowed Moore in a meaningful way — and he drastically underperformed, compared to normal Republicans running statewide in Alabama. Most party leaders, however, were equivocal on the subject, especially after Moore won Trump’s full-throated endorsement. 40 percent turnout

And the results of the actual election make it clear that the reason Republicans lost the Senate seat is that Democrats exceeded expectations. Jones is a highly qualified candidate, although many Republicans piously asserted that in light of his pro-choice views, he was a morally unacceptable option. In addition to that, he ran an effective campaign. On the eve of the election, the secretary of state’s office projected that 25 percent of Alabama voters would turn out; in the end, 40 percent did, despite dauntingly long lines at many polling stations.

Disgust at Moore — or Trump, or Republicans more generally — surely mobilized some of those voters, in addition to explaining why many stayed home. But that would have made no difference if Jones had not been poised to take advantage of an opportunity that Democrats were not expecting. Part of a pattern

In the wake of Moore’s defeat, then, Republicans should take a moment to thank Alabama Democrats for saving their bacon. After that, they need to grapple with the fact that they got lucky. Although Moore is a bad apple, he is also a symptom of a systemic problem with the contemporary GOP — one that predates the 2016 election, and is not confined to Alabama.

I know that, because I’ve been covering Texas politics since 2007. I wish it weren’t the case. But the evidence is dispositive. The United States has two major political parties. Both of them are vulnerable to nominating, or electing, the occasional bad apple, and neither party has been beyond reproach when confronted with unpleasant revelations about one of their own. But in this regard, Democrats have a demonstrably better record than Republicans, at least lately.

Let’s consider the case of Ken Paxton, our attorney general. In May 2014, he was reprimanded by the Texas State Securities Board for violating the Texas Securities Act. By doing so, he effectively admitted to a felony violation of a law that he had voted to create, some years earlier, as a member of the Texas Legislature.

Several weeks later, in the Republican primary runoff, Paxton clinched the party’s nomination. Since July 2015, he has been under indictment. Some of the Texans who voted for Paxton might be convinced that he is, as his defenders have insisted, the victim of a politically motivated investigation. Others might believe that lawlessness is an attribute in an attorney general. Many would argue that insofar as Paxton is a Republican, he was preferable to the Democratic option. But my point here is simply that Moore’s nomination is part of a pattern, in which Republicans nominate someone demonstrably unsuitable for high office and then act as if an unfortunate accident inexplicably befell them.

They’ve been doing so busily in the wake of the Alabama Senate election — casting Moore as an anomaly, and pointing fingers at the subset of Republicans who loudly supported him. I find myself puzzled, reading such reactions. Granted, most national political commentators haven’t spent much time reporting on Texas’ attorney general, or our agriculture commissioner, Sid Miller. But do they not remember the last presidential election? Agenda over character

Not long ago, Republicans believed in the concept of personal responsibility, or claimed to, at least. And, in fairness, some of them still do. Others have abandoned the pretense, in favor of arguing that ultimately, a candidate’s character matters less than whether he will vote for the party’s agenda. That’s a cynical calculation under any circumstances, and in some cases, like Moore’s, it proves selfdefeating.

But all too often, it doesn’t. And so I hope that all Republicans heed the advice that their leader gave on Wednesday.

“If last night’s election proved anything, it proved that we need to put up GREAT Republican candidates to increase the razor thin margins in both the House and Senate,” the president tweeted.

Trump is right. And if that’s too ambitious for his party, perhaps Republicans can, at least, make an effort to nominate candidates who have never flouted the law, wallowed in bigotry, or abused any of the Americans they hope to represent.