Paradigm Shift?

People have a tendency to overreact to results. You see it a lot in sports. I mean how many times have you seen a game where a team wins on a last second field goal and all of the sudden the narrative after the game is that Team A has righted the ship and is Super Bowl bound where Team B is in shambles and needs to reconstruct their roster. I see it weekly in the NFL. And if you think about it, it is so stupid. I mean the difference between the teams is pretty much nominal and the result of that game depended on a litany of things that may not be repeatable, such as lucky turnover late or a dropped pass.

Well, that is what happened last night in Alabama. Roy Moore, possibly the worst candidate in the history of the world, lost to Democrat Doug Jones for the vacated Senate seat left by Jeff Sessions. And in predictable fashion, the media goes ape nuts over the result. Claims such as ‘seismic political shift in the South’ and ‘proof that the Trump influence is being defeated’ are being bat around the airwaves.

But this is simply not the case.

Let’s look at this closer:

  • Roy Moore is a twice removed judge for not following Federal law.

  • When elected to his judicial seat, he barely eked out a victory, so he is far from a superstar in the Alabama political world.

  • He is a creepy guy who has been accused of hitting on teenagers as a judge.

  • He refused to debate Jones and avoided Alabama altogether the week prior to the election. Also did zero interviews 2 weeks prior to the election.

  • His own party threatened to not fund his campaign.

  • The senior senator in Alabama told his voters to NOT vote for Moore.

Yet…………Moore garnered 48% of the vote, the difference would have been made up by the 2% of write-ins that were essentially GOP protest votes.

I mean he got 48%!!! And he is seriously the worst candiadte ever!!!! The last thing I would ever call this race was a paradigm shift in the South.

This is also similar to the 2016 election. Yes, it is amazing that such an idiot would get any votes at all, much less enough to win the race, but the conclusions that America has completely changed and the population has spoken en masse is simply not the case at all. Essentially Clinton and Trump split the popular vote and Trump just so happened to win more states. That’s it. I’ll agree that the election showed how stupid a portion of America is and how unexplainable anyone with any intelligence whatsoever would vote for that man, but those people were stupid before the election; this just exposed it. If the election was run in October 2016, Clinton may have won. The reflection of America and its voters cannot be simplified by a binary result.

This is true with Alabama. All the events that happened before their senate election are not repeatable. In 2020, Doug Jones will lose his seat, probably to Mo Brooks or whomever, and things will return to normal. Why do I say this? Well, I have a longer memory than most in the sensationalistic media I guess. This kind of thing happens every so often in elections; blips and such due to randomness. But these are rarely enormous indicators of a ‘new world’ or of what things will come.

So my Democratic friends, we can celebrate that the Senate is now 49-51 instead of 48-52, but beyond that, there is nothing new here.