Hey Roy, hit me up if you need pointers on how to gracefully concede you dirtbag.
— Justin Guarini (@JustinGuarini) December 13, 2017
NYMag, “Roy Moore Won’t Concede, Tells Supporters to ‘Wait on God’”:
… [I]n an entirely unsurprising development, Moore refused to accept defeat, and told supporters that God still isn’t done with the Alabama Senate race. “Realize when the vote is this close that it’s not over,” Moore told his supporters in Montgomery, Alabama.
He went on to suggest that there would be a recount, adding, “we also know that God is always in control.” After quoting Psalms 40, he said, “That’s what we’ve got to do is wait on God and let this process play out.” Then he sent his supporters home, explaining he couldn’t have them waiting around all night for the final tally.
In reality all precincts have reported, and Jones received 49.9 percent of the vote to Moore’s 48.4 percent. Under Alabama law, there’s an automatic recount at the state’s expense if the results are within half a percentage point. But the gap between Jones and Moore is 1.54 percent, or about 20,715 votes…
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill if there’s any chance that Jones won’t ultimately win the race. “I would find that highly unlikely to occur,” he said. “There’s not a whole of mistakes that are made.”
“The people of Alabama have spoken tonight,” Merrill added. “They’ve made their voice heard loud and clear. The most important thing to remember now is the process needs to be followed to ensure that the integrity, the safety and security of the election is preserved.”…
Background: Justin Guarani conceded to Kelly Clarkson in the first season of American Idol, back in 2002.
Roy Moore not conceding reminds me of something I’ve noticed: a certain kind of white man, having grown used to creating realities to his liking, when confronted with a reality not to his liking tantrums like a goddamned baby
— Andy Richter (@AndyRichter) December 13, 2017
Duane
I hear the world’s tiniest Republican violins playing.
Aleta
Cermet
No, not the people of Alabama have spoken but dog did or that is what Roy keeps saying …wait, that is god – get them confused. Ok; That is good news because I’m glad the people of Alabama are showing that some repblicans actually have a moral core that isn’t corrupted like the heart of the gop and the vile animals in the senate , house and the orange fart cloud,
Karmus
Just the next step in the Grifty Shuffle.
SRW1
God to Roy Moore: “Go away already! How many more hints do you need?”
Aleta
Sister Golden Bear
Dear Roy,
I’m answering your prayers, and the answer is: oh hell no!
No love,
God
Aleta
lowtechcyclist
Roy, your wait is over! What are you waiting for, the Lot’s wife treatment? – God
Amir Khalid
I wonder if Moore is planning to sue the State Secretary to get a recount. After all, when it comes to the law Moore’s not one to worry about details.
Aleta
@Amir Khalid: Being a former SC judge (and a lawyer) he seems to believe he is the law.
Schlemazel
@Aleta:
I wonder if he could pay for a recount. The law here is that there is an automatic recount paid for by the SoS office but candidates are free to request a recount as long as they pay the expense. I could picture Uncle Roy grifting the money together to try that. I still don’t think he would be successful but he could try if the law there is the same
EDIT: @Aleta:
OH, just had to read the next comment – thanks for keeping up on this!
lowtechcyclist
@Aleta: If I’m reading that right, it looks like above the 0.5% margin, Alabama punts any review of House and Senate elections to those bodies. In which case this is OVER.
Roy Moore and his followers can wait all they want on whatever idol they worship that they’ve confused with the Lord, but the rest of us are moving on.
Sloane Ranger
Merrill admitted to voting for Moore. Call me cynical but is there any chance a sackful of postal votes sufficient to put Moore over the top will suddenly be found in a cupboard somewhere? Or is this just paranoia?
The US system seems to run on candidates conceding, what happens if Moore doesn’t?
lowtechcyclist
Due to Pence’s role as Senate tiebreaker, there’s no functional difference between a 51-48 GOP majority and a 51-49 margin. The REAL difference is between 52-48 (where the Dems need to pick up 3 GOP votes to block a GOP bill) and 51-48 (where they only need 2).
Doug Jones should request that Luther Strange yield to the will of the Alabama electorate and step down NOW, rather than waiting until Jones is formally certified the winner.
Boussinesque
@Sloane Ranger: I would hope that the Elections Board certifying the final results (or something like that) would put the nail in it—would be weird to require the opponent to concede when the official election results show they lost.
Anne Laurie
@Amir Khalid:
Depends, I think, on how much the national media attention has turned his head!
If you remember my earlier posts, Moore (& his wife) have been running a nice little grift inside the Southern Xtianist bubble that gave them fat salaries in return for him doing a few meet’n’greets and standing behind a podium to shout misinterpretations of the Old Testment — stuff he’d otherwise have been doing down at the local mall, assuming the guards let him in these days. His Senatorial run, by exposing the dollars behind the altar curtain, has already endangered that gig. But it’s not unheard-of for elderly legislators who’ve been given a shot at the brass ring (*cough* St. Wilmer *cough*) to find it hard to go back to their former rural baronies, so Moore may try to eke out his fifteen minutes by suing — or at least threatening to sue — the State Sec, the RNC, Steve Bannon, and of course Hillary Clinton, because that’s always a winner with the rubes.
I’d assumed his wife would do her best to discourage him from trading the family’s safe “Foundation for Moral Law” con for the uncertainties of national media, but after her performance at the Barn Burner, she may have been bitten by the attention-bug even worse than her old man!
Anne Laurie
@Sloane Ranger:
There were tales of GOP jiggery-pokery wafting about the ‘tubes all day. The fact that the Secretary jumped so quickly to concede to Doug Jones indicated, to this cynic, that (a) the GOP has no intention of throwing good money after bad; and (b) if there *was* dirty work at the margins — and, this being Alabama, odds are in favor, even without the sanction of the state/national party — the GOP Secretary of State has absolutely no intention of drawing any more unfriendly media attention to the sausage-making in this race.
Looks to me, at least, like the Repubs have dumped Moore’s campaign as a sunk cost. The question is whether they can get this across to Roy Moore without him kicking up too much of an attention-drawing tantrum…
Raven
Wait, I went to sleep at 10 after being assured that Jones didn’t have a chance. Buncha fucking ninnies.
Amir Khalid
@Sloane Ranger:
It’s been explained already for the benefit of us non-Americans that conceding a lost election is merely etiquette, not a procedural requirement: the voters have spoken, the loser has lost, and the winner shall be certified, no matter how much the loser pouts. Having lost by more than half a percent of votes cast, wit fewer votes left to count than the margin, Moore doesn’t get to seek a refund. He’s like that Korean Olympic boxer who refused to leave the ring after the judges awarded the fight to his opponent.
Aleta
From Rick Hasen’s blog:
“AL SOS Merrill, pointing on CNN to a recent governor’s race that was close, said that any candidate can get a recount at his or her own expense if the margin is greater. The statute allowing that is Section 17-16-21.
But that statute only allows people seeking recounts to be those “with standing to contest the election under Sections 17-16-40 and 17-16-47.”
And if you look at those sections, they do not allow candidates for federal office to request such a recount or to contest the election (presumably because these would be done in the U.S. House or Senate.)
Under 40, the ones who can contest are: “The election of any person declared elected to the office of Governor, Secretary of State, Auditor, Treasurer, Attorney General, Commissioner of Agriculture and Industries, Public Service Commissioner, senator or representative in the Legislature, justices of the Supreme Court, judges of the courts of appeals, judge of the circuit court or district court, or any office which is filled by the vote of a single county, or to the office of constable.”
Section 47 only allows a contest “of any person declared to be elected to the office of senator or representative in the Legislature, judge of the circuit court or district court, any office which is filled by the vote of a single county, or constable.”
Moore is not those. I think unless there’s another provision I’m not seeing he cannot get a recount if it is outside the 0.5% margin.
He can ask for the U.S. Senate to conduct some kind of contest but good luck with that.”
Anne Laurie
@Raven: Some people are IMPOSSIBLE to please! {grin}
Schlemazel
I am reading that Mitch McTurtle is suggesting he will not seat Jones until after the tax bill passes
NotMax
(frantic phone dialing) “Hello, Bannon? This is Roy Moore.”
“(hic) Who? (click)”
The process did play out. It’s called an election.
Shalimar
@Raven: Who assured you of that? It was still in doubt at 10 eastern, but the NY Times widget had Jones at a 66% chance of winning at that point in the count.
raven
@Anne Laurie: It’s funny, the freakout here was hilarious. Kornacki was adamant that the numbers were against Moore but people here just couldn’t stop whining.
NotMax
@Schlemazel
Until the results are certified by the AL Sec. of State (probably late, late Dec., but not later than Jan 3), Jones will not be in receipt of the documents necessary to present to the Senate in order to be sworn in.
The President of the Senate (Pence) does the actual swearing in, unless he designates a surrogate in his stead.
Shalimar
@Anne Laurie: Merrill said in the morning that turnout would be 18-20%, and said it would be 25% as late as 2:30pm, after more than 25% had already voted. I have no idea what he was doing isssuing those laughably false public announcements (turnout was 39% by my calculation), but it sounded like there was some kind of nefarious plan at the time given Merrill’s known bias. Moore would have won if turnout had been at the levels Merrill was saying it was. He should have been getting current numbers from the counties throughout the day.
raven
From Sooner Grunt’s Facebook: “And now Roy Moore will retire from politics to learn how to actually ride a horse and spend time with someone else’s grandchildren.”
raven
kd bart
You would think that Moore’s “Jew Lawyer” would know Alabama election law. Must’ve retained one of the lesser ones.??
Patricia Kayden
@SRW1: And stop molesting teenagers!! You miscreant!!
Schlemazel
@NotMax:
in the interview Mitch said it didn’t matter if the results were certified.
NotMax
@raven
Yup. Swearing on anything upon taking office is a tradition – be it a book, a cheese sandwich, a used Kleenex – not any kind of legality or requirement. Either “I swear” or “I affirm” is permissible. Indeed, the Constitution contains an oath of office only for the president. For other officials, including members of Congress, it specifies only that they “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation to support this constitution.”
Patricia Kayden
@Raven: I bailed at 9:30 pm. Tossed and turned and got up to hear this great news. So happy for Jones and those who supported him.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: In fact, you don’t need to even swear, you can affirm instead.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Patricia Kayden: I went for a walk around town and when I returned I saw the good news.
raven
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Well there you have it!
My parade tix have shipped! Now I just have to get rid of the other four I put on Stub Hub!
NotMax
@Schlemazel
Wordplay on his part. Note the “until the end of this session.”
The new session convenes on Jan.3. Although exact dates are not set in stone yet, there will be a holiday break of some kind of duration when no business is conducted come late Dec.
raven
@NotMax: Bidness
?BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: I saw you ordered new tix on the Colorado overpass, should minimize the walking. Just remember to bring a good zoom lens and practice using tracking focus on your camera to get good pics of the B-2 flyover and the floats.
raven
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yea, I located a review of that area and they said that there is no standing area in front of those grandstands and they are just 11 rows high. Combined with the fact that it’s really close to One Colorado means I can take my camera there and then dump it in the car before we go to the stadium. They were expensive but trying to figure out the logistics of the original seats was too much. It’s still going to be a long day but this will help.
NotMax
@BillinGlendaleCA
In pidgin, folks here say “Lucky live Hawaii.”
As you’re a photography maven, thought this ‘having a bad day, a really bad day’ illustration I recently came across from an old French magazine might make you say “Lucky live Glendale.”
:)
From the Feb 15, 1914 issue of Le Petit Journal Supplément Illustré.
raven
@NotMax: Dang! Ever see this one of the lion in a sidecar?
gene108
I didn’t get any Doug Jones fund raising emails yesterday, and none so far this morning.
I hope he keeps up not sending fundraising emails until 2020, when he is up for re-election.
I am glad he won, but damn did he have to send 20 fund raising emails a day to do it?
@Schlemazel:
At least Mitch has agreed to seat him, at some point…
NotMax
@raven
Heh.
Obviously before they settled on “put a tiger in your tank.”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: We’re only a mile from the LA Zoo.
ETA: And P-22 lives over there as well.
debbie
@Aleta:
The media is misreporting that he can get a recount if he pays for it. I almost wish statutes permitted that so we could watch him cheap out.
Darkrose
“Roy, this is God. Get my name out your mouth.”
Ruckus
@SRW1:
“I sent you a radio bulletin, I sent you a rowboat, I sent you a helicopter, how many more messages do you need?”
Jamey
@Duane: Justin plays “Li’l Sweet on Dr Pepper TV adverts, so, yes…