The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. That’s why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen.
Has this series exposed you to new ideas? Tell us how. Email us at ourpicks@nytimes.com.
For an archive of all the Partisan Writing Roundups, check out Our Picks.
From the Right
Jim Geraghty in National Review:
“As frustrating as it is to lose a Senate seat in a ruby-red state, it would be worse to spend the next three years having every inane, offensive, and Constitutionally illiterate utterance from Roy Moore’s mouth hung around the necks of rest of the party.”
For Republicans upset over Roy S. Moore’s loss in the Alabama Senate special election to his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, Mr. Geraghty has good news: “the Republican party dodged a bullet yesterday.” In the long run, he argues, the benefits of not having to deal with Mr. Moore in the Senate are worth the “short term pain.” Read more »
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Sarah Rumpf in RedState:
“With Moore out of the national political scene, the Democrats lose a punching bag.”
Ms. Rumpf tallies the winners and losers from last night’s special election. In the short term, she concedes that Democrats are the winners. But Mr. Moore’s loss deprives the Democrats of a target for their criticism. Her list of losers includes the president, Stephen K. Bannon, the Republican Party establishment and Senator Al Franken of Minnesota, among others. Her list of winners includes Richard C. Shelby, the senior Republican senator from Alabama, and the White House staffers that have sought to limit Mr. Bannon’s influence. Read more »
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Robert Tracinski in The Federalist:
“The obvious lesson here is that angry populism fueled by resentment against the bogeyman of supposed ‘elites’ is not the basis for a political party or movement.”
Though Mr. Tracinski admits that no one could have predicted, before the election, that Mr. Moore would have a litany of sexual misconduct allegations weighing down his campaign, voters should have seen other problems likely to arise. We could have foreseen, for example, that “he is the kind of personality that is a constant source of random political embarrassment” outside of the Republican mainstream. And those who think that it was merely the sexual misconduct charges lodged against Mr. Moore that sank him, Mr. Tracinski argues, are not seeing the coalition of voters that came out for Mr. Jones, including the overwhelming majority of black women. Mr. Moore may “have retained the loyalty of his die-hard, core supporters, but at the expense of alienating everyone else.” Read more »
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From the Left
“Black people did this. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”
According to Mr. Harriot, neither the Democratic National Committee nor the national news media deserve credit for Mr. Jones’s stunning victory on Tuesday. “Doug Jones didn’t even do this,” he adds. Instead, all of the credit should go to African American voters who came out in support of the Democratic candidate. “We’ve been cleaning up your messes since 1619, and it’s getting kind of old,” he writes. Read more »
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Eric Levitz in New York Magazine:
“Democrats had no reason to believe that they could win Jeff Sessions’s old Senate seat. But they prepared for that possibility anyway. Now, they’ve got to do the same in every state in the country — and not just because you never know when a Republican candidate will turn out to be a child molester.”
The biggest lesson Democrats must learn from the Alabama election, writes Mr. Levitz, is that they can run a competitive race anywhere. He explains how important it is not to punt on elections that seem unwinnable: “The inconvenient truth for Democrats is that they have no hope of exercising federal power without investing in long-shot races in hostile territory.” Read more »
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Jim Newell in Slate:
“Jones is just one vote. But one vote in the Senate changes everything.”
Although Mr. Jones probably cannot prevent the Republicans from passing their tax bill, writes Mr. Newell, it is hard to overstate how his victory changes the calculus in the Senate. “Not only is the Republicans’ partisan agenda dealt a near-fatal blow by Jones’ arrival, but the G.O.P. now has its work cut out trying to retain a Senate majority in next year’s elections,” he explains. Read more »
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Finally, From the Center
Nate Silver in FiveThirtyEight:
“Not every race is going to go as badly for Republicans as this Alabama Senate election — but if enough go half as badly, or even a third as badly, they’re still in for a rough time next year.”
Mr. Silver has bad news for Republicans hoping to cast Mr. Moore as an outlier. As long as there continue to be “candidates who are nominated by the G.O.P. base against the wishes of party elites,” he writes, the party’s problems will continue. He compares Mr. Jones’s victory to that of Scott Brown’s January 2010 victory in Massachusetts. Read more »
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Jonathan Bernstein in Bloomberg:
“I’ve argued all year that the risks of opposing Trump are minimal for Republicans. After Alabama, more and more Republicans are going to believe that.”
After a presidential election, Mr. Bernstein explains, people tend to believe that the victor has some sort of “electoral magic,” something that was certainly true at the beginning of Mr. Trump’s term but has since all but dissipated. He wonders if, after Tuesday’s election in Alabama, Republicans across the country will become even more emboldened to challenge the president, and potentially run against him in 2020.
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