To understand the political tsunami set off by the Alabama Senate
primary on Tuesday, when Roy Moore, an anti-gay Christian fundamentalist who believes that Biblical law should supersede the Constitution, won the Republican nomination* for a
Senate seat in a runoff election, consider the case of Senator Bob Corker.

Corker is a two-term Republican from Tennessee. He is up for
reëlection next year, and has already raised six and a half million dollars. He’s only
sixty-five years old, which is young in the geriatric U.S. Senate. He
has one of the most coveted committee assignments in Congress: chairman
of the Foreign Relations Committee, which, aside from making him one of
the most influential voices on foreign policy, is also a perch that
makes raising campaign funds enormously easy. Corker won his 2012
campaign by thirty-five points. Trump won the state last year by
twenty-six points. In short, Corker is a senator at his professional
peak.

And yet on Tuesday, the day that Moore defeated Luther Strange, the
incumbent senator who was appointed to the job when Jeff Sessions left
to become Attorney General, Corker announced that he was retiring. “When I ran for the Senate in 2006, I told people
that I couldn’t imagine serving for more than two terms,” he said in a
statement. “Understandably, as we have gained influence, that decision
has become more difficult. But I have always been drawn to the citizen
legislator model, and while I realize it is not for everyone, I believe
with the kind of service I provide, it is the right one for me.”

Nobody really believed him. Corker, after Strange, seems to have been
the second Senate casualty of this latest phase of the G.O.P. civil war.
Even though there was no heavyweight Republican lined up to challenge him in a primary,
Corker decided that the environment was too toxic. “That guy did
not want to go through the house of pain,” a Republican who worked
on the Moore race said. “He did not want to go through what Luther Strange
went through.”

Expect a lot more Republican casualties, especially in the Senate.

While it’s dicey to read too much into one state’s special-election
primary, there are a number of lessons from Alabama. The first is about
Trump, who endorsed Strange even though his most solid supporters in the
state rallied around Moore, a former chief justice of the state Supreme
Court who was twice booted off the court for disobeying the law—once, in
2003, for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments, and
again, in 2016, for directing the state’s judges to maintain a ban on
same-sex marriage. The idea of having Roy Moore in the United States
Senate was terrifying to Washington Republicans, and Mitch McConnell and
others convinced Trump to back his opponents, first in an open primary
and then in this week’s runoff.

Naturally, the race was billed as a test of Trump’s ability to persuade
his own base. It didn’t work. The Republican consulting firm
Firehouse Strategies, in a memo to clients, noted that there was no correlation between knowledge of
Trump’s endorsement and support for Strange. In mid-May, sixty-four per
cent of Alabama Republicans knew about Trump favoring Strange. By
primary day, this week, eighty per cent knew about it. Over the same
period, G.O.P. voter support for Strange didn’t budge. The firm’s
takeaway for its Republican clients is that, “while Trump may be good at
translating his supporters’ sentiments, he is unable to persuade them.”

Another memo, obtained by the Times, puts the lessons for the Republican Party over
all in starker terms. Since 2010, the year that the Tea Party insurgency
began rocking the G.O.P. establishment, the ability of incumbents in
Washington to tame its right wing has ebbed and flowed. In 2010 and
2012, several subpar candidates making outlandish statements won Senate
primaries, and probably cost the Republican Party control of the Senate.
The Party regrouped and snuffed out similar unelectable challengers in
2014, when it won control of the Senate, and in 2016. But the post-2016
period has ushered in a new wave of insurrection.

“This year’s Alabama Senate special election shows that the 2014-16
playbook for winning Republican primaries needs to be recalibrated and
improved” was the conclusion of the memo’s author, Steve Law, the head of the Senate
Leadership Fund, which is essentially Mitch McConnell’s funding vehicle
to protect his mainstream Republican Senate majority from being
overtaken by the Trumpist right. Law argued that Republican voters were
“still angry,” and that McConnell’s inability to get much done,
especially the repeal of Obamacare, was “political poison” in the race.

Most interesting, the lesson for the G.O.P. establishment is that it has
lost control of the Republican Party. Law writes that, in the minds of
Republican voters, Obama, previously the face of the opposition, has
been replaced by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. “Opposition to Obama
used to be a mainstay of Republican messaging,” he wrote. “In Alabama,
Strange’s litigation against Obama’s executive actions would have been
political gold a year ago. But with Obama out of the picture, our
polling found the issue to be a middling vote-getter. Now the answer to
what is wrong in Washington is the Republican Congress.”

Law, contrary to some others, sees Trump’s inability to translate his
support to Strange as inconsequential, arguing that the Party’s base is
now defined by its reverence for Trump. “No other person, group or issue
has the gravitational pull on Republican primary voters that Donald
Trump commands,” he notes, adding that “support for President Trump
directly correlates with likelihood to vote.” Republicans, he says, are
more likely to see themselves as Trump supporters than as Republican
Party supporters. The single most fatal line of attack in a Republican
primary, he suggests, is evidence that a candidate has been critical of
Trump. It’s worth noting that, last month, Corker told local reporters in
Tennessee, “The President has not yet been able to demonstrate the
stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in
order to be successful”—remarks that Trump then attacked on Twitter.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former political strategist, who backed Moore, is
now plotting an expansive campaign to recruit challengers to Republican
Senate incumbents, and is targeting some dozen races next year. Despite
carrying the banner of nationalism and populism, Bannon is ideologically
flexible. His first criterion for candidates is authenticity. (He
obviously cared little about Moore’s anti-gay views.) But Bannon’s most
important priority is the current G.O.P. leadership. When he was
in the White House, Bannon believed that McConnell stymied Trump’s
agenda and that, especially in the Senate, there was no constituency for
the nationalist cause. So Bannon and his allies have made a decision
about next year’s midterms: they will not back any candidate who agrees
to support McConnell as Majority Leader.

*This post has been updated to clarify the nature of Roy Moore’s electoral victory.