This account doesn't seem entirely satisfactory, though, especially since each craven re-endorsement came with its own peculiar variety of hedge. For McConnell and Cruz, it wasn't about them, or about him, they explained—it was about allowing the democratic process to run its course. While Trump's support was a bit more vociferous, he worked hard to make clear that he is less concerned about electing Moore than he is about not electing Jones. "We need his vote on stopping crime, illegal immigration, Border Wall, Military, Pro Life, V.A., Judges[,] 2nd Amendment and more," said Trump, rattling off a nonsensical list of right-wing buzzwords in the hope of hitting a bingo with his target audience. "No to Jones, a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet!" And even if politicians are once again offering tepid support for their party's candidate, this doesn't explain why voters are coming around to the idea, too.

Getting to Yes on an Alleged Predator

It's been nearly five years since President Obama introduced a fun bit of marketing jargon into the political lexicon while discussing Republicans' reluctance to support some of his more ambitious policy initiatives. "We're going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what's going to be best for the country," Obama said at a 2013 press conference. "But it's going to take some time."

His comments drew a flurry of snarky responses from the right—remember, this is what a "scandal" in Washington used to look like—but he was, in retrospect, on to something. A permission structure, as defined in a helpful Reuters report at the time, is something that pushes “the proper buttons that need to be pushed” so that people buy something "they otherwise would shun." Roy Moore deserves to be shunned. But he is nonetheless mounting a comeback thanks to an emerging permission structure that will allow Alabamians—maybe enough of them—to check the box next to his name without feeling guilty enough to do anything different.

For partisans, the case has been made many times over. McConnell and Ryan and company have spent the last year watching multiple iterations of their vaunted Affordable Care Act repeal efforts get spiked into the ground, and as the 2018 midterms approach, cutting taxes for wealthy donors is their last chance to accomplish something meaningful with this unified Republican government. Yes, putting pedophilic creeps in elected office is bad, but so is getting shellacked in November and handing the gavel to Nancy Pelosi—or whoever might succeed her—in January. This is a numbers game. There's a time and place, the logic goes, to consider the propriety of sending a child molester to the Senate. It just isn't right now.

Moore's record makes cajoling single-issue zealots into a relatively easy task, too. The man had earned the support of the religious right well before these allegations ever came to light—for opining that homosexual conduct should be illegal, and for his well-established extremist views on abortion, and for refusing to comply with a court order requiring him to remove a Ten Commandments monument from his courtroom, and for resigning his judicial office instead of giving effect to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, and so on and so forth. Many pastors continue to back him, and Moore has been embracing the us-versus-them angle during the homestretch. The election is a "spiritual battle," he urges, and the stories about him in the press are attempts to "silence our message."

There's something here for everyone. To xenophobes, Moore is the one who believes that Muslims shouldn't be allowed to serve in Congress, and who was still pushing the bigoted lie in December of 2016 that President Obama might not be a U.S. citizen. For garden-variety racists, Moore shoots off dog-whistle tweets bemoaning the fact that ex-felons in Alabama are (lawfully) registering to vote in the special election. And as the Project Veritas idiots have ably demonstrated, for Fox News conspiracy theorists, Moore is the latest victim of political correctness gone awry, tarred and feathered by a clumsy left-wing social justice warrior attack aimed at discrediting the #MAGA movement. None of these things excuse his abuse of underage girls. But they all appeal to emotions that are so powerful and so personal that voters who hold those beliefs can't fathom a world in which they'd cast their ballot for anyone else.

Conservative Voters (Still) Don't Trust Women

Particularly at a moment when the sexual assault president is getting bumped from the Time Person of the Year cover for the women sharing stories of sexual assault committed by powerful men, perhaps the strangest defense to emerge is the one that, in one way or another, argues that what Roy Moore did wasn't really that bad. The Federalist, which fancies itself as one of the last bastions of reasonable conservative thought in the age of Trumpism, recently published an op-ed asserting that grown men dating teenagers "was not an uncommon occurrence during this time," and that the practice "is not without some merit if one wants to raise a large family." Breitbart questioned the relevance of accusations against Moore made by a then-16-year-old on the grounds that she was of the state's age of consent. And state auditor Jim Ziegler dismissed the hubbub with a little counterfactual arithmetic, noting that if the victim had been 16 instead of 14, “It would have been perfectly acceptable.” There are voters in Alabama—and everywhere else—for whom romantic involvement with teenagers is not inexcusable. It's not good, mind you, or ideal. But there is enough wiggle room in this worldview where, under the right circumstances, this abuse might be palatable—and where a little encouragement is all it takes to keep sympathetic voters in his corner.