Roy Moore suffers major new blow in Alabama with just three weeks to go
The Senate race in Alabama has turned into an unprecedented and hideous spectacle. For the first time, we’re about to learn what happens when an election takes place in a heavily Republican state, and the Republican candidate is an alleged child molester who refuses to drop out. The polls are still all over the place, and it’s unclear who’s in the lead. But what is clear is that embattled Republican candidate Roy Moore just suffered a quantifiable major new blow that tells us a lot more than any external polls do.
Roy Moore’s Communications Director resigned on Wednesday, citing all the usual cliched political excuses for ill timed resignations (link). The campaign is correct when it points out that these kinds of personnel changes do tend to happen during the course of a long campaign. But they do not happen in major campaign staff positions just three weeks before election day without a good reason.
There are only a handful of reasons why Roy Moore’s Communications Director would be resigning at this late date. The first explanation would be that the guy grew a conscience and decided he could no longer work to get an accused child molester elected to the United States Senate. If so, then Moore just suffered a key personnel blow internally at the worst possible time. The second explanation would be that Moore’s internal polling tells him he’s losing, and he made a last minute panic move by forcing one of his top people to resign so he can change direction.
As we’re learning, it takes an awful lot for a Democrat to have a chance to win a U.S. Senate seat in a deeply Republican state. However, the walls do seem to be caving in on Republican Roy Moore as the fallout from his scandal deepens. If liberals and Democrats continue to get strongly behind Democratic candidate Doug Jones, he does have a legitimate chance of winning on December 12th.
