Day 328: Jones Wins! Three Winners and Three Losers From Election Night

Alabama has their first Democratic senator in a quarter century after Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore by about 20,000 votes in their special election Tuesday night. The Jones win narrows the GOP’s edge in the Senate to just 51–49.

Hats off to Jones and his team for running a near-perfect campaign, finding the right way to convey his message while also appealing to a fairly broad spectrum of the electorate.

As for Moore, he and his team ran one of the worst campaigns in recent memory, managing to lose Alabama — Alabama! — to a moderate, pro-choice Democrat. Plagued by allegations that he hit on and molested teenagers as a 30-something attorney, Moore’s defense progressed from, ‘I generally didn’t date teenagers,’ to ‘they’re all lying’ to ‘I don’t even know who these women are and the Washington establishment is railroading me.’

Moore also refused to debate Jones and instead chose to just fling mud. Rather than discussing actual policies, Moore chose to quote Scripture almost non-stop.

The far-right leaning Moore has a reputation of a xenophobe, racist, and homophobe, with well-documented positions regarding putting the military on the U.S.-Mexico border, banning all Muslims from serving in Congress and making homosexuality illegal. In the last few weeks, Moore compared himself favorably with Vladimir Putin and said the U.S. was last great when slavery was still legal.

Moore’s campaign was in shambles even to their bitter end, as on the final day of the campaign Moore’s wife, Kayla, fought back against allegations that the Moores were anti-Semites by noting, “One of our attorneys is a Jew.”

Kayla’s speech was preceded by one of Moore’s army buddies — who hadn’t spoken to Moore in over four decades — incredibly recalling a story of the men accidentally walking into a brothel that employed underage girls while they served in Vietnam. Considering the allegations against Moore, putting him in a brothel with underage girls just a couple years before he allegedly sexually assaulted underage girls was probably not the most intelligent move.

In the end, error begot error and Moore was dealt a humiliating defeat.

After such a momentous night, beside the candidates, there are three additional winners and losers.

Winners

• Alabama: The people of Alabama are the big winners from Tuesday night. They tapped Jones, a 63-year-old former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the KKK, to serve their state honorably. Alabamans won’t see stories for the next three years — the seat reopens in 2020 — about how they elected a bigot or are the most backward state in the U.S. Businesses will be less reticent to continue moving jobs to Alabama and their burgeoning economy. When the choice was between a rational moderate and a fringe-right lunatic, the people chose sanity and steadiness.
• Democrats: The Democrats — from the national party to elected officials to locals on the ground — did an excellent job motivating people to vote in an off-year, special election, as well as effectively pushing Jones’ message. Democrats owe their largest debt of gratitude to the African American voters in Alabama, who supported Jones at a 96 percent clip, as well as women, who supported Jones at a 57 percent clip. With even a slight dip in support from either group, Roy Moore wins. After huge victories in Virginia and now Alabama, the party now has a wave of momentum heading into the midterm elections, just 11 months away. Before Tuesday night, the Democrats needed to peel three seats away from the Republicans to flip the Senate. Now, while still improbable, if the Democrats manage to win Jeff Flake’s open seat in Arizona, oust Dean Heller in Nevada — a state Hillary Clinton carried in 2016 — and hang on to their remaining seats up for grabs, they will have a majority. Just a few months ago the Republicans were thinking about a 2018 veto-proof supermajority, but they woke up Wednesday worrying about keeping their majority at all.
• Moderate Republicans: Many Republicans lined up to support Moore, citing the need to keep a larger majority in the Senate, but a great many did not, including Flake, John Kasich and Mitt Romney. While most elected Republicans largely supported Luther Strange in the Republican primary, when he was defeated by Moore, moderate Republicans running in a year had to see it as a potential disaster for themselves. Instead, with Moore’s defeat, there are clear signs that a far-right agenda is not necessarily what many voters want, even choosing to lean more left than go that far right.

Losers

• Donald Trump: Trump could have sat back and said nothing about the race, as many Republican senators chose to do. Instead, he went from supporting Strange to dipping a toe in the water for Moore to full-throated support for him. Trump tweeted encouragement for Alabamans to vote for Moore, recorded a robocall message, held a rally a stone’s throw from the Alabama border where he cited the need for a Moore victory, and privately claimed he didn’t believe any of Moore’s accusers. With Moore’s defeat, Trump took one on the chin when he really didn’t have to. As it is, voters in a state he easily won in 2016 rebuffed him during the primary and again in the general. Additionally, the margin for error to pass Trump’s agenda has also gotten narrower, with Democrats needing to just peel back two of the GOP’s more moderate brethren to defeat any bill or nominee. The loss was humbling, even for Trump.

• Steve Bannon: The alleged genius was the driving force behind Moore in the primary. If Bannon doesn’t get behind Moore, Strange likely wins the primary and then the general with ease, and Trump doesn’t humiliate himself by supporting back-to-back losers. Instead, Bannon stumped in Alabama and rallied against the establishment, eventually convincing Trump the race was likely to go for Moore and to throw his support behind him. His missteps along the way were ugly, with clunky defenses to Moore’s sexual assault allegations to the night before the election insulting MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s educational background. Scarborough attended the University of Alabama.
• The Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee: Each managed to debase themselves in their own special way, as they managed to lose perhaps the reddest state in the nation. The RNC, after dropping support for Moore, inexplicably picked it back up as the allegations against him grew more credible and more numerous. They provided no explanation for their flip-flop, but the implications were clear: they believed Moore’s accusers — hence, the cease in support — but ultimately didn’t care, returning to help raise money and campaign. Meanwhile, after the results came in on Tuesday, NRSC chairman Sen. Cory Gardner (R-CO), debased himself by urging Jones, a lifelong Democrat, to caucus with Republicans, citing the will of Alabama voters.

328 days in, 1134 to go

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