"The easy thing for Republicans to tell themselves after the stinging loss of a Senate seat in Alabama is that they only went down to defeat because the party had the misfortune to nominate someone accused of preying on teenage girls.

And there is something to that. But the Republican Party nominated a man accused of sexual misconduct to run for president in 2016, and that didn't stop him from winning 62 percent of the vote in Alabama. Donald Trump didn't just win Alabama a year ago - he won by a larger margin than Mitt Romney, John McCain, or George W. Bush. So while it's undoubtedly true that the allegations played a role in the race, they hardly work as a comprehensive explanation of the outcome.

The larger issue is that the Republican Party is led by an unpopular president and unpopular congressional leaders who are pursuing an unpopular agenda, and it's putting them in massive electoral peril."

Matthew Yglesias


-------------------------
"The truth is incontrovertible.
malice may attack it,
ignorance may deride it,
but in the end,
there it is." -Sir Winston Churchill