in So That Happened

Roy Moore Supporters Are Blaming Absolutely Everyone, Except Roy Moore, For Their Loss

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Because everything in politics now is contentious, important, and aggravating, the Senate special election in Alabama was easily the most well-covered special election to fill a vacant Senate seat in modern American history. The stakes were pretty high: In the unlikely event that Democrat Doug Jones won, the Republican majority in the Senate would fall to 51 to 49, which would make it that much more difficult to pass tax “reform” and ban Obamacare forever. And yet somehow, when the dust settled, Jones beat Moore by about 20,000 votes, nothing short of a blue miracle in deep-red Alabama.

Professional and amateur pundits have already composed a thousand think-pieces trying to pinpoint how a state that went all-in for Trump in 2016 (he beat Hillary Clinton there by 28 points). Conventional wisdom suggests that things like a massive, Democratic get-out-the-vote operation, or how a whopping 97 percent of African-American voters supported Jones, or how some people just couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Moore because he’s preyed on teenage girls and got banned from a shopping mall for doing just that. But things like “facts” don’t much matter when you’re sad, or don’t realize that the guy you supported was a very bad man and a very bad candidate.

Moore’s fussy, sore-loser supporters are now blaming everyone and everything for Moore’s loss. There’s no way people simply didn’t vote for him, they feel; clearly, the election was a sham, or the fix was in from those fat-cats in Washington. It was a pouty-faced scene at Moore’s victory election night party in Montgomery, Alabama.

A supporter named Chanel Rion put the blame on Mitch McConnell. “It leads back to him,” Rion told The Huffington Post. “This room is gonna be walking out with a vengeance. We know who’s responsible.” Rion’s fiancé, a Missouri politician named Courtland Sykes said it’s a conspiracy, man. “This is 100-percent an effort by the Washington establishment to keep Roy Moore out of it. If they can put a Democrat in office in Alabama, in 2017, to replace Jeff Sessions, ever after Donald Trump won by a landslide in 2016, that means they can replace anyone they want. We don’t have an honest republic if this can happen.”

Another guy they want to blame is Richard Shelby, Alabama’s other senator, a Republican, who last weekend publicly denounced Moore, saying he voted for somebody else because the GOP “can do better.” At Moore’s party, one supporter mentioned that he wanted to track down Shelby, or an “establishment” guy like him and then “punch in the face.”

A self-described conservative student at the University of Alabama named Ben Smith blames turncoat Republicans, who for some reason wanted to distance themselves from Roy Moore. “What didn’t help is Republicans jumping ship during Roy Moore’s greatest time of need. That destroyed any party unity we had left.”

Pro-Moore folks are also pointing fingers on Twitter.

Some of Moore’s detractors weighed in, too.