Lex Anteinternet: Oh, for the want of a third party. . .

 No, not a painting of somebody Roy Moore was accused of dating back in the day. .. but rather how members of third parties envision coming to power.

From yesterday:

Lex Anteinternet: Oh, for the want of a third party. . .: Watching the story of the election in Alabama, which will occur today (I'm dreading the flood of news tonight), I have to once agai...

Well thank goodness that's over with.

A couple of observations.  The Republican lost but maybe the Republicans won by that Republican loosing.  It was hard to see how the GOP would have overcome the taint of Moore.  Moore was more than a little spooky even without the teenager ickiness stories floating around him.  One man I knew who worked in Alabama for years and who is a staunch conservative regarded him as a power spook.

Of course, the GOP only wins, long term, if it finds a way to both do what it claims it stands for and to heal the rift that's splitting it effectively into two parties, in one falling down house.

The Democrats of course get one more in a nearly evenly divided Senate, meaning that maybe they take the Senate in 2018.  Or maybe not.  Democrats being Democrats would likely apply their seeming rule that a person must be at least 175 years old to be in a leadership position and then wreck their new chances.  If you couldn't vote for FDR, darn it, you should just sit and be quiet, you whippersnapper.

I have to wonder why, in a race like Alabama's, third parties didn't try to take a real run at the seat that was up for election.  There are at least three serious third parties, but they all seem to operate on the idea that they'll win the White House in some magic election and then rule from the top down. That's absurd.  They need to crack open a door into legislative bodies, and the best way to do that is to push on a door that's already broken with a pole that can actually batter it down.  Nobody seemed to.  In a race like that in Alabama, in which voters wanted a conservative candidate which didn't present them with troubling moral choice, one third party, the American Solidarity Party, would seemingly have had at least a chance of getting a few votes.  If it could have persuaded a known disaffected Republican to run, it might have had more than a chance.

But it doesn't seem to have done that, in  so far as I know.

As seemingly the concept that there ought to be more than two parties, and and that there effectively are more than two as the Democrats and the Republicans have huge internal devices, just can't seem to find an expression in actual elections.