- A first look tonight at the dramatic election
in Alabama this week,
a drama that propelled a Democrat to the U.S. Senate
in Alabama for the first time in 20 years.
Democrat Doug Jones riding on a tide of women and black voter
support defeated controversial Republican candidate Roy Moore
in spite of Moore's endorsement by President Trump.
Moore's profile of inflammatory positions on race,
women and as well as sexual misconduct allegations became a
litmus test of the current political moment.
For some insight as to what all this means,
we turn to Mordecai Lee, a professor in the Political
Science Department at UW-Milwaukee.
Thanks very much for being here. -- Thanks for inviting me.
-- Was the Alabama election
really just about a bad candidate?
- I think it's really easy to over-interpret the results.
You're right.
He was a bad candidate in the sense he was a bridge too far
even for people who generally vote for Republicans.
So it doesn't mean a lot.
It showed you that there's an outer limit to what in a sense
soccer moms will vote for.
It also showed us under certain circumstances you can have a
higher than average turnout in college towns.
You can have a higher than average turnout
with African-Americans.
But nonetheless, those are moderate results.
We shouldn't read too much into it.
- Was it a referendum on President Trump, in your mind?
- You know, to a certain extent,
every election that occurs when there's a sitting president
could be interpreted as a referendum on the president.
This probably was a little bit.
Virginia probably was a little bit.
But generally speaking if we talk about Wisconsin politics,
even though every midterm election,
people start saying this is a referendum on the president,
whether it's a Democrat or Republican,
generally speaking Wisconsin election results are not a
referendum on the sitting president.
- Now, you talked about turnout just a moment ago,
but how did this election turn on voter turnout?
- Well, it turned on voter turnout
in both the pluses and the negatives.
It was a negative in the sense that some typical Republican
voters stayed home.
Some typical Republican voters wrote in a nominee.
In other words, they didn't vote for their party's candidate.
That margin would almost have been enough to change results.
Then the Democratic base turned out in an above average way.
So if we want to translate that to Wisconsin,
so in Wisconsin we're going to be having a midterm election.
Midterm elections have a lower turnout than you would expect
from presidential elections.
Generally speaking, based on economics,
the lower the turnout in Wisconsin,
the more the results skew for a Republican.
For Democrats this is a heavy lift.
This is getting a presidential turnout
in a non-presidential year.
- So you don't think Democrats should believe that
the Alabama results necessarily carry forward?
- Well, ask me the day after the election
and then we can know for sure.
But does it give Democrats optimism when they look at it
across the board, not just Alabama, but Virginia?
Sure, it gives them optimism.
They want to reelect a sitting U.S. Senator
in an off-year election when they usually don't do very well.
So there's something to encourage them.
But I'd say generally speaking we should expect that
Republicans would be in a better position.
- It's interesting, though, because just after the election
results came in, there was a lot of talk about how badly hurt
Republicans would be by this.
But you don't think so?
- Well, there's no doubt that the Republican brand is hurt
generally speaking by Trump, but if you look at what happened a
year ago - excuse me, in 2016, Trump loses the Wisconsin
primary to a more establishment candidate.
That's good news for a candidate like Vukmir.
Trump wins Wisconsin in the general election.
That's an appealing result when it comes to Nickelson.
So to a certain extent, Republicans really have to weigh
it, do we vote for who we love in the Republican primary
or do we vote for the person
who we think has the better chance of winning?
Now, of course Vukmir can make the case
that she can win in November.
But if we're just interpreting results about the establishment
Republican Party and the Trump Republican Party,
high turnout in Wisconsin would be more beneficial
to the Trump candidate.
- Let's pivot a little bit and let me ask you about rumors
that Paul Ryan is going to retire.
What do you make of those? - I think it's true.
Ever since he read "Atlas Shrugged" as an undergrad,
he became an Ayn Rand person.
That he believed that the success in America was bound up
with changing marginal rates.
Lowering marginal rates
so that really the creative class has more money.
And then he sat at the feet of Jack Kemp,
who was the original believer in supply-side economics.
A believer in the Laffer curve.
So all his career, he's wanted to cut the marginal rates for
upper incomes and for corporations.
He's accomplished his life's dream.
What's the second act?
It can only be anti-climactic.
And he's been in for 20 years.
So I think it's true.
I think he's likely to step down.
- The second act, though, that he has also heralded for years
is entitlement reform.
- I think entitlement reform from a political point of view
is another bridge too far.
If we look back, George W.
Bush gets reelected, says he wants to spend all his political
capital of his second term to reform Social Security and it
went just nowhere.
He just really wasted all that political capital.
I think that Ryan is a very good politician.
He remembers that happens and he probably realizes the odds are
of not succeeding in doing it.
So why not go out on a high rather than on a low.
- Mordecai Lee, we leave it there.
Thanks very much. - Thank you, Frederica.