I’ve said it on twitter and I’ll say it here: people vastly underestimate the ick factor involved with molesting a 14 year old, along with pursuing teen girls at malls and schools. Tired aspersions of AL do not begin to give the good folks of that state enough credit (the bad folks can go to hell.)
PS. 2018 will be a wave year. See below.
Nate Cohn/NY Times:
A Democratic victory in an Alabama Senate race would rank as one of the most improbable, astonishing outcomes in the last few years of improbable, astonishing political events.
So, yes, this could happen.
The Roy Moore-Doug Jones contest can be seen as a mad experiment to test the limits of Republican strength in Alabama, perhaps the toughest for Democrats in the country. It might be reasonable to say that if Democrats can’t win it here and now, they just can’t win it as long as the country remains so divided by race, religion and education.
Jamelle Bouie/Slate:
Doug Jones has a chance. Allegations of sexual assault have turned Judge Roy Moore’s already divisive campaign toxic, opening the door to a Democratic Party upset. But to make that happen, the Jones campaign has two major tasks. First, he has to build out his base, i.e., the black voters who form the foundation for Democratic Party performance in the state. Second, he has to win an unprecedented share of white voters. And for as much as the polls show real opportunities for Jones, any effort to win over Alabama whites will be a tremendously difficult uphill battle.
There’s always someone who dots the i’s and crosses the t’s on awful.
Michael Gerson/WaPo:
In all of this, there is a spectacular accumulation of lies. Lies on disclosure forms. Lies at confirmation hearings. Lies on Twitter. Lies in the White House briefing room. Lies to the FBI. Self-protective lies by the attorney general. Blocking and tackling lies by Vice President Pence. This is, with a few exceptions, a group of people for whom truth, political honor, ethics and integrity mean nothing.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg View:
Let's Start Taking Trump's Unpopularity Seriously
Yes, polls can be wrong. But there's no particular reason to believe these are any more than a few points off, and they could just as easily be wrong in either direction. No, the 2016 election didn't reveal major polling problems. The idea that national polls were wrong during the 2016 general election is simply a myth, although some state polls were off by several percentage points. And the polls predicted his nomination from early on; it was "experts" (such as myself) who were wrong. There's no reason beyond wishful thinking among those who do support the president to believe that he's actually popular and surveys are just missing it for some reason.
Political gravity asserts itself. Just because Trump won doesn’t change everything. It was a fluke. Funny thing is, that interp makes more sense than the grand “we’re doomed” stuff.
Amy Walter/Cook Political Report:
A Wave Is a Comin'
The last two weeks have seen some significant movement in Democrats favor. First, there were the impressive results from last Tuesday’s elections. This week, we’ve seen two polls — one by Quinnipiac and one by Marist — that show Democrats with a congressional ballot advantage of +13 to +15. Three other recent polls — ABC/Washington Post, Fox, and NBC/Wall Street Journal — show Democrats with an advantage of anywhere from +7 to +15…
My colleague David Wasserman has been digging into the question of just how big of a wave Democrats need to get in order to surf into the majority. The short answer: they need to see a generic ballot advantage of +8 or more, which roughly translates to getting at least 54 percent or more of the national House vote in 2018.
Meanwhile, the last two polls, Marist and Quinnipiac, were looking at +13 and +15.
Erin Gloria Ryan/Daily Beast:
On the heels of Tweeden’s disturbing allegations, however, another woman came forward claiming that she too had been “stalked and harassed” by Franken. Melanie Morgan teased her accusation with a Tweet, and then directed curious readers to her website. On her website, she described how Franken called her more than once because he disagreed with how she was discussing a policy issue on the radio.
Even giving Morgan the extremely generous benefit of the doubt, it’s hard to pretend what she alleges Franken did is the same thing as what Tweeden’s picture shows Franken actually doing. Nor is what Tweeden’s picture shows, horrible as it is, the same as what somebody like Roger Ailes or Bill Clinton did.
Which gets to a problem. Right now, the court of public opinion is faced with the awkward task of assigning degrees of severity to sexual misconduct, because, while they all cause harm, they don’t all cause the same amount of harm and thus don’t merit the same punishment. Furthermore, punishment varies by the power the offender wields. A senator, for example, should have a much higher moral threshold than, say, a comedian. Writing in The New Yorker this week, Masha Gessen treads lightly in making this point, warning that the #MeToo moment could devolve into “sex panic” if we’re not careful. “The distinctions between rape and coercion are meaningful, in the way it is meaningful to distinguish between, say, murder and battery,” Gessen writes.
WaPo:
The Finance 202: 'Biggest tax cut in American history' isn't popular with many Americans
The Senate plan has significant problems of its own when it comes to lower- and middle-income workers. To comply with the chamber’s budget rules, the bill prioritizes permanent corporate cuts over breaks for individuals that sunset after a decade. But those at the bottom of the income scale would see tax hikes sooner than that.
Don’t overlook that Doug Jones is running a great campaign.