President Trump accused Ed Gillespie (R) of political “malpractice” and “dereliction of duty” for not uncovering the racist yearbook photo of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) during their gubernatorial campaign in 2017.
Said Trump: “If they find that terrible picture before the election, he wins by 20 points!”
New York Times: “Jones, the Democrat who was an unwitting beneficiary of misinformation tactics during a special election in Alabama in 2017, asked the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday to investigate the episodes… The overall effort, which cost $100,000, was underwritten through an intermediary by Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn.”
Said Jones: “Such deceptive tactics have no place in American politics and must be repudiated by those involved in our political system.”
First Read: “With President Trump closing on a message of fear and immigration in these waning days, here’s a reminder: This is exactly the same message that Ed Gillespie and the GOP used at the end of the 2017 gubernatorial race in Virginia.”
Axios: “One big warning for Republicans in the midterm elections: Democrats got more votes for their money in every competitive special election since President Trump took office.”
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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) got the go-ahead from Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) to suspend state law so the governor can call a special election to replace former Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) as soon as possible, the Texas Tribune reports.
“Days after a woman accused U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexual impropriety, two Moore supporters approached her attorney with an unusual request,” the Washington Post reports.
“They asked lawyer Eddie Sexton to drop the woman as a client and say publicly that he did not believe her. The damaging statement would be given to Breitbart News, then run by former White House strategist Stephen Bannon.”
“In exchange, Sexton said in recent interviews, the men offered to pay him $10,000 and promised to introduce him to Bannon and others in the nation’s capital. Parts of Sexton’s account are supported by recorded phone conversations, text messages and people in whom he confided at the time.”
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Former U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) “is pleading for money to pay for his legal bills as he fights a lawsuit against a woman who says he molested her when she was 14,” the AP reports.
Moore said that his “resources have been depleted” and had raised just $32,000 of a $250,000 fundraising goal.
”Leigh Corfman has accused Moore of touching her when she was 14 and he was in his 30s. She is suing Moore, saying Moore and his campaign defamed her as he denied the allegations.”
Wade Perry, the manager of Doug Jones’ (D) longshot U.S. Senate campaign in Alabama, told McClatchy that “before Jones even won his own primary, and hatched a plan with campaign chairman Giles Perkins. Their realization: the campaign needed to show Republican voters — some of whom hadn’t voted for a Democrat in decades — that it would be OK to support one this time around.”
“And what better way, they thought, than letting the average Alabamian see rows of Jones signs in their neighbors’ yards?”
“Perry himself can scarcely believe he’s talking about them seriously… But the man who managed the most stunning upset in recent Democratic political history has a larger — and much more important — point he wants to make; his party must be willing to try something different with their politics and campaigns, especially as it prepares to compete this November in a litany of Republican-rich areas.”
Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) “is confronting a fierce backlash from conservatives over his refusal to support Roy Moore in last month’s special election — with Moore backers pushing a censure resolution and robocall campaign targeting the powerful lawmaker,” Politico reports.
A new Quinnipiac poll finds Democrats with a massive 17-point lead over Republicans in the generic congressional ballot, 52% to 35%.
Also interesting: Voters disapprove of the recently enacted Republican tax plan, 52% to 32%.
Roy Moore accuser Tina Johnson lost her home in a fire that is now under investigation by an arson task force, the Birmingham News reports.
“Tina Johnson, who first came to public notice for accusing Senate candidate Roy Moore of grabbing her in his office in the early 1990s, said her home… caught fire Tuesday morning… By the time the flames were extinguished, Johnson and her family had lost everything they owned.”
Martin Wishnatsky, who worked for failed Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R), tells the Birmingham News that his background “is 100 percent Jewish” but that “he accepted Christ in his thirties.”
Said Wishnatsky: “I’m a Messianic Jew. That’s the term they use for a Jewish person who has accepted Christ.”
Roy Moore, the first Republican to lose a U.S. Senate race in Alabama in 25 years, moved to block state officials from certifying the victory of his Democratic rival on Thursday afternoon because of “systematic voter fraud,” the New York Times reports.
Politico notes that Moore has continued to fundraise by asking donors to contribute to his “election integrity fund,” pledging to pursue “voter fraud and other irregularities at polling locations throughout the state.”
Meanwhile, The Hill reports Moore “says he completed a lie detector test after the Alabama Senate election concluded to prove the allegations of sexual misconduct are untrue.”
The Associated Press: reports that the rift between President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions “still has not healed. Recently, Trump bemoaned the Republicans’ loss in a special election in Alabama and in part blamed Sessions, whose departure from the Senate to head to Justice necessitated the election.”
Alabama’s secretary of state announced that his office had received 4,967 provisional ballots and that “no additional ballots are eligible to be received,” the Washington Examiner reports.
That figure is “well below the number needed to trigger a recount, let alone overcome the 20,715-vote lead of Doug Jones.”
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☑️ Life in the Middle: Marginalized Moderate Senators In the Era of Polarization is available on Amazon. It takes a deep dive into the power of moderates and why we see them behave so precariously.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.