I think it would be an effective campaign strategy if he was running in a general election and there were a dozen GOP Senate candidates who ran on a platform of changing the Senate leadership in Washington. Absent that, this did nothing but antagonize 51 other U.S. Senators who were going to be sitting next to Moore in Washington every day. You don't even hear Donald Trump -- the original "Drain the Swamp" candidate -- calling for McConnell to be replaced. Why is this? Because Trump knows McConnell doesn't answer to him, and he has to work with McConnell to get anything done.
I've answered this before in other discussions. The entire statement is predicated on their being a challenge. If there is no challenge, it doesn't apply.
And therefore it was a useless campaign slogan. So the Alabama Senate race had two candidates facing each other who both despised Mitch McConnell. Great.
Even if you see it that way, this "tone deaf" approach had nothing to do with why Moore lost. Moore lost because a Democrat party motivated kook made 40 year old lurid accusations against him, and on the basis of these unproven accusations, his own party membership deliberately stabbed him in the back. (Especially Richard Shelby.)
Roy Moore lost because 600,000+ people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 didn't vote for Moore in 2017. You can blame the allegations and the GOP leadership for his loss, but you should really be focusing on what happened with all those lost voters.
There never was going to be an offyear election in which any candidate received what the Presidential candidate received. You are deliberately skewing reasonable expectations here.
You are also deliberately ignoring the cause of why people didn't vote for Moore. The primary cause is that the media accused him of being a child molesting rapist, and nobody wants to vote for a child molesting rapist. Secondly, his party membership behaved as if they believed these unproven accusations, and some of them urged people to vote for Doug Jones and some of them urged people to "write in" another candidate.
This election broke the record for "write ins" in Alabama, and the write ins were more than enough to tip the balance to Moore.
Lying accusations from Democrats, and Party backstabbing from Republicans. *THAT* is what caused people to stay home or vote for someone else.
You can blame the allegations and the GOP leadership for his loss, but you should really be focusing on what happened with all those lost voters.
I have been focusing on them, and I have been trying to get *YOU* to focus on them, but you don't seem to want to focus on the reasons why those people stayed home when all polls indicated Moore was going to win in a landslide.