Republicans might be stuck with Roy Moore
The besieged Alabama Senate candidate owes nothing to the national party.
By DANIEL STRAUSS, ELANA SCHOR and KEVIN ROBILLARD 11/09/2017 04:01 PM EST Updated 11/09/2017 08:26 PM EST
GOP leaders desperately want Roy Moore off the ballot. But they have neither the legal nor the political leverage to force the defiant ex-judge out of the race.
The White House, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and a host of other Republican senators called on Moore to drop out of the race Thursday if there were truth to the accounts of four women who told The Washington Post that Moore pursued relationships with them while they were teens and he was in his 30s. The news sent Republican operatives scrambling to parse the dusty sections of Alabama state law that deal with replacing candidates on the ballot. But some absentee ballots have already been sent to voters, which appears to make it impossible to install someone in place of Moore on the Republican Party line.
The election is on Dec. 12.
Apart from the legal considerations, Moore owes no loyalty to Republican leaders in Washington, who backed another candidate in the primary and spent millions of super PAC dollars to defeat him while Moore won the nomination on an anti-McConnell platform. Moore’s campaign lashed out as condemnation rained upon him Thursday, calling the story a “baseless political attack.”
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https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/09/roy-moore-republicans-senate-scandal-244753
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