In my Politico column today, I wrote about Alabama:
Ed Gillespie ran away from Trump and lost in Virginia. Roy Moore ran toward Trump (with a lot of excess baggage) and lost in Alabama. One was a wonky establishment Republican careful to sand away any hard edges in his political persona; the other was an obstreperous and ignorant insurgent Republican who prided himself on his outrageousness. It didn’t matter.
They both were defeated the same way, holding their own Republican voters, but getting overwhelmed by a tide of millennials, suburbanites and minorities motivated by their abiding animus toward Trump.
The backlash that conventional wisdom thought Trump would create among these voters in 2016, to his own detriment, is coming about in 2017, to the detriment of his fellow Republicans. They can’t rely on the circumstances or the personal qualities that helped Trump get over the top last year.