Democrats should plan for Republican failures

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake

Doug Jones, the only Democrat that Alabama has sent to the Senate in my lifetime.

Yesterday, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was defeated in his primary by one of the largest margins ever for an incumbent Senator. The reason is clear: he voted to convict Trump after Jan 6, and that alone is enough to make him toxic to the party’s base.

With Louisiana now certain to elect a sycophantic pro-Trump Senator this November, this prompted Matt Yglesias to question why Democrats aren’t trying harder to flip the seat:

The obvious candidate was recent Governor John Bel Edwards a.k.a JBE, who has won statewide twice and has taken a number of socially conservative positions such as being pro-life and pro-gun. It’s not entirely clear why JBE didn’t run for Senate this year after initially considering it, although I’d suggest that the current state of the national Democratic Party and the pressure that Democratic Senate candidates face to adhere to the party line helped make it a less attractive proposition for him.

However I do want to make the case that it would’ve been worthwhile for Democrats to nominate JBE or a JBE-style candidate, despite the fact that they would start the race as an underdog and the fact that similar attempts have failed in recent memory (most notably, Phil Bredesen in Tennessee in 2018).

Since Obama was elected President, there have been seventeen Senate elections in the three core Deep South states: Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Democrats have only won once: Alabama, in 2017. That election is famous as the time Republicans nominated Roy Moore, a far-right pedophile, to the Senate. This was a candidate so bad there’s a real chance he would’ve been expelled from the chamber had he been elected. Amazingly, you can still find precincts in Alabama where Moore received over 90% of the vote — I would suggest that this is not necessarily because the voters there thought Moore was the best guy ever, but because the idea of electing pro-choice liberal Doug Jones was unconscionable to them. Had Democrats nominated a pro-life JBE-style candidate, I’m confident they could’ve won a much more convincing landslide that year. And if they’d nominated a hardcore progressive, as opposed to a mainstream Alabama Democrat like Jones, I think Roy Moore would’ve likely won.

Republicans have had two other recent close calls with Senate races in the Deep South: in 2014 the party came within 1,700 votes of nominating neo-Confederate Chris McDaniel in Mississippi, and in 2018 Cindy Hyde-Smith won the same state in by just 7%. In the first case, Democrats landed a good candidate in former Rep. Travis Childers, but got unlucky when Chris McDaniel lost the primary. In the second case, Democrats got lucky with a weak Republican candidate and a favorable environment, but failed to fully capitalize on it, nominating the somewhat-moderate Mike Espy rather than a genuine Mississippi conservative Democrat like Jim Hood or Brandon Presley.

If Democrats had consistently better candidate recruitment in the South, and if McDaniel had performed just slightly better in his primary, we could’ve had a situation in 2019-20 where Democrats controlled three out of the six Senate seats from MS/AL/LA, including both from Mississippi. This isn’t a pipe dream, we genuinely weren’t too far from it. But it requires Democrats to actively seek out strong candidates in the hopes that Republicans fuck something up, rather than looking at the fact that they start out as an underdog and concluding it’s not worth the effort. And it requires the national party creating conditions for these ideologically heterodox candidates to be welcomed into the tent, rather than pushed out of it or forced to move left.

Julia Letlow — who looks nearly certain to be the Republican nominee in Louisiana this year — doesn’t strike me as particularly likely to end up on the list of disastrous Republican Senate candidates, but trying to pick this stuff far in advance seems like a fool’s errand. You really just have to cross your fingers and hope.

God has blessed the Democratic Party by giving them an opposition that can’t stop nominating pedophiles, racists and ideological extremists to the US Senate. They just need to be wise enough to take this gift and run with it.