WASHINGTON • This week’s election result from Alabama provides lessons for Missouri, as the Show-Me state pivots toward one of the most important Senate races in the nation’s recent history.
Tuesday’s upset victory for Democrat Doug Jones over Republican Roy Moore for a U.S. Senate seat from Alabama also provides stark consequences for Roy Blunt and his Senate leadership colleagues as they deal with a diminished majority. For now, it means there’s room for just one Republican “no” vote on every major issue still confronting the administration of President Donald Trump.
Democrats now have a Senate seat in a deeply Republican state, tilting the math toward Democrats in what had been, before Tuesday, a longer-shot chance to take over the Senate in 2018.
The GOP now has only a 51-49 majority in the Senate, and issues such as infrastructure spending become more thread-the-needle exercises for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., unless Republicans embark on a new course to attract more centrist members of the Democratic caucus, including Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.
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Blunt, who served as a top vote-counter and persuader in the House from 2003 to 2009 before moving to the Senate and its leadership team, told reporters that he believed the narrower majority could actually help GOP leaders shape legislation.
“When I was the whip in the House, the easiest whipping we ever had was when we had the smallest majority we ever had because everybody knew what they had to do,” Blunt said. “They had to be part of what was going to get done. So I don’t think it changes anything at all.”
But electorally, Jones’ victory certainly does. Republicans now have a greater urgency to defeat Democratic senators running for re-election in 10 states Trump won in 2018, including McCaskill, if they are to hold the Senate.
Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley is the most well-known Republican candidate for that job in a primary field that includes lesser-knowns Austin Petersen, Courtland Sykes and Tony Monetti.
Petersen, a former Libertarian who describes himself as a “liberty Republican” who supports both gay marriage and eliminating central banking, said that Alabama showed that “the future direction of the GOP shouldn’t be populism.
“The problem is you can win with Trumpism in the primary, but you can’t necessarily win in a general with Trumpism,” Petersen said. “... You have got to be appealing to a general electorate, or you can’t win.”
For McCaskill, Jones’ victory in a deep red state was also validation of her strategy to try to diminish Republican margins in rural Missouri while energizing urban Democrats and appealing to suburban women.
“This was a former prosecutor who wasn’t afraid to be himself, and work hard to earn the votes of the people of his state,” McCaskill said. “Sounds like a plan.”
Alabama victor Jones was previously a federal prosecutor; McCaskill was a local prosecutor in Kansas City.
McCaskill will have her 50th town hall meeting of 2017 this weekend at St. Louis Community College’s Meramec Campus in Kirkwood on Saturday. A vast majority have been in rural Missouri.
Moore had been removed twice from the state’s Supreme Court and faced fresh allegations that, as a man in his 30s, he preyed on and may have sexually assaulted teenage girls as young as 14.
“As I said previously, Alabama voters should have had a better choice,” Blunt told the Post-Dispatch. “Candidates matter.”
The off-presidential congressional elections of 2018 now come into focus with Trump’s job approval at historic lows for a president at this stage of his presidency.
But Republicans believe that could change — and their prospects for holding onto Congress could look much different — if they pass contentious tax cuts before Christmas and if the economy continues to flourish as it has done with bullish job growth and a booming stock market.
Democratic candidate recruitment, especially of women, has also been on a bullish pace, and the “resistance” movement that began a day after Trump’s inauguration with a massive women’s rally on the National Mall has manifested in convincing Democratic victories in Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, as well as in Alabama’s Senate special this week.
Dave Robertson, department of political science chair at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said Jones’ win in Alabama hinted of a “wave election in 2018 favoring Democratic candidates.
“All Republican incumbents in Congress have to expect stronger Democratic challengers and challenges in 2018,” Robertson said. “That means more money, more support and more workers for challengers.”
He said that “elections in Virginia and now Alabama indicate that appealing to the base of the Republican Party will not be enough (for Republican candidates) to win elections.”
Hawley has already attacked McCaskill as a Democratic party-line foe of Trump’s tax cuts, which the Republican Congress could pass next week and Trump could sign before Christmas.
Republicans say it will put money back into the pockets of average Missourians and further help stimulate the economy, and will be positively felt before the election. McCaskill and Democratic colleagues say the GOP plan tilts far too heavily toward the rich and will add dangerously to the government’s debt without commensurate economic stimulus.
Robertson said the Alabama election, in which Moore won suburban voters, especially women, suggests difficulty for Illinois Republican incumbents Mike Bost and Rodney Davis in Metro East, and Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Ballwin.
And nationally, he said, it could widen cracks between traditional Republicans and a renegade movement forced by ex-Trump aide Steve Bannon.
“Alabama crystallizes the worst fears of Republicans and most unlikely hopes of the Democrats,” Robertson said. “Moore might have been a poor candidate, but he represented a strong element of the Republican Party. Bannon and Trump will continue to fight for this element.”
Hawley has so far successfully negotiated that divide in Missouri, Robertson said, but he will also have to deal with fresh Democratic attacks that he’s “Trump’s loyal enabler-to-be.”
But that could be a plus in many parts of Missouri. Blunt said recently he believed that, national polls aside, the president was still popular in the Show-Me state.
And with Moore’s loss Tuesday, Republican 2018 candidates, including Hawley, won’t have to confront questions about what they thought of Moore’s fitness to serve in the unfolding sexual harassment scandals that have brought down many powerful men.