The Alabama Senate election
was about everything except Alabama. And in the end, Alabamans stayed home and
let the inevitable turnout tide of passion politics take its course. Minority
voters rallied to Obama. Republicans stayed home. And the GOP is now holding on
to a bare one-seat Senate majority.
The Democrats had abandoned
Alabama, along with much of the South. They weren't interested in Doug
Jones until they smelled weakness. And they still aren’t interested in
representing Alabamans now. They just want another Senate seat to bring them
closer to blocking and impeaching President Trump.
Alabama isn’t a place to
them. It’s another chess piece in a Washington D.C. game that they can use to
block judicial nominations, shut down the government and reverse the results of
the previous election. They have Alabama now, but history suggests that unless
they learn the lessons that cost them their former strongholds in the South,
they won’t hold on to the seat that they paid a very pretty penny for.
The Alabama River follows a
long and meandering course. But not nearly as long and meandering as the dark
river of money that poured into the Alabama Senate race.
The tide of cash swirled,
eddied and drifted along the secret rivers that flowed from Washington D.C. and
San Francisco, from Las Vegas and New York City, and decided an election. Timed
spending meant that they could avoid revealing their donors. And the biggest
spender in the race had no money.
Some of these rivers had
strange names.
There was Highway 31.The real
Highway 31 links Alabama to Michigan. But the Highway 31 SuperPAC was a money
route worth over $4 million leading back to Washington D.C. and New York City.
Behind the local name were Senate
Schumer's Senate Majority PAC and the Obama/Hillary Priorities USA Action which
was best known for a slimy ad accusing Mitt Romney of killing a steelworker’s
wife.
Soros money may have poured
down Highway 31 as the secretive shell group became the
biggest outside spender in the race. Even though officially its bank account
was empty. Instead consulting firms run by Obama staffers did the work on
credit for Highway 31. That meant Highway 31 didn’t have to reveal its donors
until after the election. Meanwhile Highway 31 ran an ad warning Alabama voters
that their votes in the election were a matter of “public record” and that
their “community will know.”
Coming up behind Highway 31
was Stand Up Republic. Like Highway 31, Stand Up Republic is a folksy false
front. Behind the name that could easily belong to a jeans company or a chain
of comedy club is Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent, Wall Streeter and
independent 2016 presidential candidate.
Stand Up Republic claims to
be fighting for “democratic norms”. McMullin claims to be a Never Trumper
conservative. Neither claim holds up very well considering that the only known donor to SUR is Persian
billionaire Pierre Omidyar who provided $250,000 to McMullin’s group. The
Franco-Persian tycoon is best known for funding The Intercept, a radical
left-wing site that specializes in undermining national security and which will
be forever linked to the Snowden spy case.
McMullin has claimed that,
“Donald Trump is not a loyal American and we should prepare for the next four
years accordingly.” His own loyalties appear to be rather complicated.
Omidyar’s SUR grant is listed alongside grants like Veterans Against
Islamaphophia and Strategies for American Muslim Communities.
Out of these murky waters
came $500K in ads.
David Brock’s American Bridge
21st Century got into the game by urging Alabamans to write in the names of
popular football coaches. And there was the voter diversion to Highway 31’s
voter suppression. The goal on both ends was to depress and dilute the
Republican vote. And it happened.
Do David Brock or Evan
McMullin really care about Alabama? No more than the slick agency hired to cut
ads that would appeal to Alabamans while achieving the political goals of their
masters.
This isn’t about Jones or
Moore. It’s about Trump. Both men were interchangeable names thrust suddenly
into a national game. Staggering amounts of money and power are being leveraged
to take Trump down. Alabama was only one of the places marked by the roaring
fury of their passage.
The nearly $12 million that
poured into Jones’ war chest and the added millions in outside spending were
meant to buy a Senate seat for #resistance. No one expects Jones to lead it.
But when impeachment comes up, they expect him to vote the right way. And he
will.
That’s the way that the game
is played.
In the past races were
nationalized, now they’re Trumpized. States and districts don’t matter in and
of themselves. They’re just chess pieces in a game. And the endgame is
checkmate. The game may appear to be played in Alabama or Georgia, but the
players are actually in Washington D.C. The strategy failed quite a few times
before it finally worked in Alabama. But political consultants can lose a
thousand times. They only have to win once. And the win in Alabama will mean
big bucks.
And it will mean that the
Dems will try to crack conservative states by ‘Mooring’ Republicans. Alabama
offers a new strategy for winning by depressing the Republican turnout while
relying on Obama to boost the minority vote. That’s where the likes of Evan McMullin
come in. Splitting the GOP vote is crucial to this strategy. Hillary Clinton
tried it against Trump. And it didn’t work. But it did work in Alabama.
It probably won’t work again.
But that doesn’t mean that it won’t be tried over and over again. And what that
means is that the political culture of the next few years is about to get even
uglier.
But the trouble with
political strategies is that they overlook the people who actually vote in
elections. Money can occasionally buy elections, but without structural
leverage, like massive voter fraud or identity politics bloc voters, it won’t
allow the Democrats to reclaim their lost territories for long.
The Alabama victory has
Obama’s fingerprints all over it. Not necessarily the man, but the campaign and
its strategy of achieving short term victories at the cost of long term defeats
by using tactics that are inherently self-defeating. Clever plans that reduce
people to numbers that can be nudged in the right direction work, until they
suddenly don’t. Because people do have minds of their own.
The Democrats haven’t
relearned how to win in places like Alabama by connecting with the concerns and
needs of the majority. And without that, any victories that they win are bound
to be dependent on temporary cunning stratagems that carry the seeds of their
own destruction. Trump Derangement Syndrome will convince the Democrats that
they can replicate Alabama nationally when they go after Trump once more. And
so Alabama may be the seed of their 2020 electoral defeat.
ABOUT DANIEL GREENFIELD
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom
Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
