Trump and Bannon Can’t Save the Day

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Mobile, Ala. — Donald Trump and Steve Bannon are politically impotent.

The president and his former grand strategist threw considerable weight behind Roy Moore, the polarizing Republican Senate candidate in Alabama. For the second time this year, the state that gave Mr. Trump crucial early support during the presidential campaign — and his first senatorial endorsement — has rejected the candidate Mr. Trump endorsed for the Senate.

Extraordinarily high turnout among African-American voters pulled the Democratic nominee, Doug Jones, a former United States attorney, to a narrow victory. Mr. Moore was held back by a significant resort to write-in ballots (some 1.7 percent of the total, a fact on which Mr. Trump quickly fixated) that presumably came from voters who ordinarily lean Republican — suburban professionals, especially women — along with tens of thousands fewer suburban Republicans voting at all. For example, in Shelby County, neighboring Birmingham, Mr. Trump earned 73,000 votes and a 51,000-vote margin, but it appears that Mr. Moore won 36,000 votes and a 9,000-vote margin.

The last four days of the race, though, featured a series of embarrassments for Mr. Moore, several stemming from re-unearthed interviews of his and several more involving gaffes by his team at Mr. Moore’s final campaign rally.

As played through the social-media filter (meaning relevant context sometimes was lost), the interviews showed Mr. Moore saying: 1) life was better early in American history despite the existence of slavery; 2) American immorality may well make the United States the focus of evil in the modern world; and 3) all constitutional amendments after the 10th — thus including the antislavery amendments and the one giving women the vote — should be repealed.

His own team’s gaffes included one rally speaker talking about the time he and Mr. Moore walked into a brothel featuring teenagers (Mr. Moore insisted they walk right back out). At the same election eve rally, Mr. Bannon blasted MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough for attending a worse college than Mr. Bannon did — a snobbish remark in the best of circumstances, made worse by the fact that Mr. Scarborough’s alma mater is the University of Alabama.

To top it off, Mr. Moore’s wife, Kayla, played into the most obvious of stereotypes when she told those assembled that she and her husband must not be anti-Semitic because “one of our attorneys is a Jew.”

Mr. Jones also benefited from very strong criticisms of Judge Moore issued by Alabama’s senior Republican senator, Richard Shelby, and from one of the few black Alabamians with crossover racial appeal, the former basketball star Charles Barkley.

Mr. Jones’s camp used Mr. Moore’s references to slavery and unnecessary amendments, along with a robocall on Mr. Jones’s behalf by Barack Obama, to encourage higher turnout in what had seemed a rather disengaged African-American population. Mr. Trump’s campaign rally for Mr. Moore in Pensacola, Fla., meanwhile, couldn’t really do much to help Mr. Moore, because Mr. Trump’s core voters were already in his camp. In fact, Mr. Trump’s unpopularity among black voters arguably energized them even more against the judge than anything Mr. Moore or Mr. Jones did.

African-American turnout was high statewide, almost 30 percent of the total vote — it usually averages less than 25 percent. At Hope Chapel AME Zion Church in Prichard, a city bordering Mobile that is 85 percent black, more than 700 voters already had turned out by 4:30 in the afternoon, two-and-a-half hours before the polls closed. Linda Robinson, the longtime chief clerk at the polling place, told me that any turnout above 1,000, even in a presidential election, is quite high for that precinct — and that they appeared well on the way to topping that benchmark.

“With Alabama being such a ‘red state,’ this election is seen as a chance to change that,” she said, in summing up what she was hearing from the community. “People see this as a chance” to promote “the issues we care about.”

“Jones ran a very issues-driven race,” Napoleon Bracy, Jr., Prichard’s state representative, said. “The kitchen-table issues that he talked about ended up being issues that crossed racial lines, crossed gender lines — children having health insurance and the opportunity for a high-quality education.”

Mr. Bracy is right, to a point. Mr. Jones’s ads, most of them featuring him speaking directly to the camera, ably portrayed the Democratic candidate as likable, serious and forward-looking. One featured him stressing the important of prekindergarten programs, pitted against Mr. Moore’s 2007 news column comparing pre-K to “totalitarian regimes like those of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.”

Mr. Bracy added this, though: “It obviously didn’t help Roy Moore that so many different things came out that were clearly divisive-type language, like getting rid of Amendments after the 10th and about life being great even when there was slavery.”

Meanwhile, at the risk of giving too much credence to a few anecdotes, I noticed a new theme emerging during the final weekend among conservative professionals who already had ruled out any chance of voting for Mr. Jones. Having internalized the numerous recent polls showing a growing lead for Mr. Moore, more of these conservatives started saying, in effect, that Mr. Moore would win without them anyway, so they would just not vote. It seemed like a psychological inoculation against the possibility of feeling at all responsible if Mr. Moore did something embarrassing from his Senate perch.

As for Mr. Moore, his campaign spent the final days relentlessly flogging e-messages that said that the judge was the victim of a smear campaign devised by Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, and his “establishment” allies. Typical of them was the emailed fund-raising plea that included the insistence that “This race will not be decided by Mitch McConnell and the forces of evil.”

Yes, “forces of evil.” Mr. Moore’s team was saying that the leader of his own party in the legislative body he wanted to join was an “evil” part of “powerful forces who hate our Christian conservative values. Powerful forces who hiss and howl at the mere mention of God, morality and obedience to the Constitution.”

This is an example of why Mr. Moore’s strengths and weaknesses are quite Trumplike. He attracts unusually intense support from people who see the entire system as rigged, but by so sharply drawing lines even against his own party, he turns off moderate suburbanites who usually lean Republican.

Mr. Bannon’s two final-week appearances on Mr. Moore’s behalf probably did more harm than good. Not only did he effectively insult the state’s flagship university, but his demagogic attacks against numerous prominent Republicans backfired in a big way — especially when he blasted Mitt Romney, the Mormon former presidential candidate, for “hiding behind his religion.”

Finally, there was the Trump factor. The president backed Mr. Moore with numerous public statements and tweets, held a pro-Moore rally nearby, and recorded a robo-call on Mr. Moore’s behalf. But exit polls showed that half of the voters in this formerly Trump-besotted state were now saying that their impressions of the president were negative.

Mr. Moore’s own controversies dragged him down. But the president and his strategist sidekick badly botched their attempted rescue mission.

When a president puts so much of his own prestige on the line in a state overwhelmingly supportive of his own party, and the president’s candidate loses, the buck stops, and the blame starts, in the Oval Office, with the tweeter-in-chief.