Heads Roy Moore Wins, Tails the GOP Loses

It’s Election Day in Alabama, and what might have been a sleepy affair—replacing long-time senator Jeff Sessions with another conservative Republican—has been anything but. The wildly divergent polls show everything from a relatively modest victory for the Republican, former state supreme court chief justice and credibly accused child molester Roy Moore, to a relatively big win for the Democrat, former prosecutor Doug Jones.

The result will almost certainly be something in between those two possibilities (or outside them, even) but no matter who wins Tuesday, the special election has further fractured the Grand Old Party. My colleagues Alice Lloyd and Andrew Egger spoke with multiple members of the Republican National Committee who are split on the RNC’s decision to re-enter the race with funds to support Moore. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and its chairman, Colorado senator Cory Gardner, have remained firmly opposed to Moore’s campaign. Nearly every Republican senator, including and especially Alabama’s Richard Shelby, is opposed to Moore.

But President Donald Trump, who has semi-rallied for Moore and cut an eleventh-hour robocall for him, sits atop the GOP. His decision to wait for weeks after the Washington Post’s bombshell outlining the allegations against Moore before re-committing himself to the Republican candidate underscores the party’s big divide. That’s because the Republican faithful, along with much of the party infrastructure, are with Trump and have adopted the president’s “winning above all” mindset. Trump’s full embrace of Moore has only extended and intensified the intra-party war.

If Moore wins, that opens a new set of problems for Republicans, who will be haunted by the junior senator from Alabama throughout the 2018 midterm cycle. If Moore loses, it will be viewed on the Trump side of the party as thanks in part to a betrayal by those in the GOP who abandoned their candidate at the first sign of pedophilia. Make no mistake: Nothing will be resolved after the polls close Tuesday evening.

Quote of the Day—This comes from former White House adviser Steve Bannon, at an election eve rally in Alabama on Monday: “There’s a special place in hell for Republicans who should know better.” That’s a thinly veiled reference to Ivanka Trump, who used the same “special place in hell” formulation to refer to “people who prey on children” in a statement on the allegations against Roy Moore.