It looks like Roy Moore, who in Alabama two weeks ago surprisingly lost a U.S. Senate special election, is taking a cue from Chris McDaniel’s campaign against Thad Cochran three years ago: Just refuse to believe the results.
McDaniel, a conservative “drain the swamp” state senator, led Cochran in the 2014 Republican primary. It looked like he was going to beat the aged, feeble incumbent in the runoff. But a surprising turnout of black voters in the party runoff — people who had not voted in either party primary — gave Cochran a narrow winning margin.
To this day, McDaniel has not conceded defeat, arguing that non-Republicans cost him the GOP nomination. He utterly failed to recognize that minorities can vote for Republicans, too. The country, you will recall, settled the issue of voting rights rather emphatically in the 1960s.
Moore’s last-minute challenge of the Alabama results, in which he lost to Doug Jones by nearly 22,000 votes, got rejected Thursday by a judge, and state election officials certified Jones’ victory shortly afterward. But Moore’s lawsuit makes it clear that he’s reading from the same playbook as McDaniel, blaming fraud and black voters for his defeat.
Like McDaniel three years ago, Moore utterly fails to recognize the obvious. In this case, it’s that reports of Moore’s pursuit of teenage girls in the 1970s were the most important factor in his defeat.
Democratic candidates aren’t supposed to win statewide elections in Alabama, but the questions about Moore gave Jones a larger advantage than perhaps even he realized.
If Moore had a leg to stand on, Alabama officials would have lifted him up. But the governor, attorney general and secretary of state — all Republicans like Moore — signed paperwork certifying the election results. The secretary of state, John Merrill, who is in charge of running elections, said that so far his office has found no evidence of voter fraud.
Moore’s lawsuit bordered on the ridiculous. It claimed that Jones’ slim margin of victory was contrary to most independent polls before the election, when in fact that result was well within polling’s typical margins of error.
It also claimed that voters may have been brought in from other states, and that there was high voter turnout recorded in Alabama’s most populous counties, where Jones racked up a lot of votes. Which makes Moore one of those politicians who doesn’t want people to vote.
Moore has every right to make sure that there were no gigantic errors in counting the votes. But when he refuses, just as McDaniel did in 2014, to accept the will of the voters — without evidence — just because it doesn’t fit the campaign narrative, it degrades other election results that actually may be problematic.
Late on election night, when Jones held a slim lead, a Moore campaign official spoke at a reception and told the audience that, no matter what happened with the vote count, God was in control. Could it be that God was sending Moore a message through the election results? If so, the defeated candidate refuses to listen.
