Alabama Senate election: Democrat Doug Jones defeats Republican Roy Moore

That fact that Doug Jones won the Alabama Senate special election on Tuesday is clear to everyone — except apparently to Roy Moore.

The Alabama Republican still refuses to concede the race, which he lost by more than 20,000 votes. Now even the White House — whose current occupant went all in for Moore — is basically telling him to give it up.

Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore in the Alabama race for Senate on Tuesday. According to the CNN exit polls, this is largely due to the massive turnout and support of Black women voters. At only 26 percent of the population of Alabama, Black people represented 30 percent of the electorate, with 97 percent of Black women voting for Doug Jones (compared to white women’s 34 percent). This, in the face of reported attempts at voter suppression, is a display of fierce determination. In multiple articles and social media postings, many championed Black women’s unwavering dedication. #Blackwomen started trending on Twitter.

Mark Ruffalo announced that he has it on good authority that God is a Black woman. J.K. Rowling is of the same opinion. Others are urging their platforms to let Alabama serve as an example of the way Black women can save America. One popular account simply repeated the phrase on a loop, “Trust Black women. Trust Black women. Trust Black women.”

Alabama — a state that Donald Trump won by almost 28 percentage points — elected a Democratic senator in Tuesday’s special election, rejecting Trump’s preferred candidate, a Christian theocrat who was, in recent weeks, accused of sexual misconduct with numerous teenage girls decades ago. Many news outlets have suggested that that Alabama Christians have had, well, a “come to Jesus moment”; Christianity Today’s headline, for example, read “Roy Moore Was ‘a Bridge Too Far’ for Alabama Evangelicals.“

But preliminary exit poll results don’t necessarily bear that out. White Christians who identified as “evangelical” or “born again” (a term common in the evangelical community) made up 44 percent of Alabama voters, and a full 80 percent voted for Moore (overall, 68 percent of white voters chose Moore). This was unsurprising, given that nearly all — 94 percent — of Moore voters reported not believing the allegations against him. For them, Moore’s alleged misdeeds were the product of a biased liberal media smear campaign and nothing more.

To some, the results of Tuesday night’s Alabama special election might look like a victory for #MeToo.

Roy Moore, a man accused of sexually pursuing, abusing, or assaulting multiple teenage girls, was defeated by Doug Jones in an unexpected upset, sending an Alabama Democrat to the Senate for the first time in 25 years.

The most important policy question of the day: What does Doug Jones’s underdog win Tuesday night mean for the GOP tax overhaul drive?

Officially, the answer is nothing. Party leaders believe they can draft a bill by Friday and pass it on Monday, at which point they’ll still have 52 Senate votes and thus room to spare even with Bob Corker defecting.

Just a few months ago, practically no one would have predicted that Democrats would pick up a US Senate seat in the Alabama special election. But they did with Doug Jones’s victory Tuesday — and their chances for retaking the chamber next year have dramatically improved.

It’s long been very difficult to plot a plausible path to a Democratic Senate takeover in 2018, since the party faces such a disadvantage in the map. Democrats have needed to gain, on net, three seats. Assuming they defend all 26 of their own that are up (no easy task), there are then two Republican-held seats — Nevada and Arizona — that have seemed seriously in play.

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Obamacare repeal might really, actually, truly be dead.

When Democrat Doug Jones won Alabama’s hotly contested Senate special election on Tuesday night, observers on Twitter were quick to point one thing out: Jones’s victory was most likely due to high black turnout, particularly among black women.

Despite fears of the reduced turnout often seen in an off-cycle elections, belief that the Jones campaign made missteps in its black outreach, and concerns that voter suppression tactics in the state could reduce the number of black voters able to cast ballots, black voters made a commanding display of political power on Tuesday night, according to preliminary exit polls. In a state where African Americans usually make up one-fourth of the electorate, the initial exit polls suggested that they exceeded that turnout rate, with early numbers putting them at 30 percent of Tuesday’s electorate.

Doug Jones’s victory over Roy Moore Tuesday night in Alabama’s special election for US Senate was enough of a shock that most political pundits didn’t have ready-made explanations for why it happened. So in the aftermath, they’re poring over what little data they have to determine which groups of voters helped push Jones over the top by showing up to vote for him, and who hurt Moore worst by staying home.

The easiest way to draw these conclusions is to look at the exit polls conducted while Alabamians were voting. The exit polls are, in some ways, more detailed than the official voting tallies. And because they break down votes by demographic groups, they can often present ready-made narratives — like the idea in Alabama that black voters, and especially black women (who made up 18 percent of the electorate but voted 97 percent to 3 percent for Jones) “saved” the election for the Democratic Party.

A Democrat will be the newest senator for one of the reddest states in the country.

A key explanation for the shocking upset on Tuesday night in Alabama’s special election: Black voters turned out — and strongly backed Democrat Doug Jones over Republican Roy Moore.

For the past four months, Birmingham City Councilor Sheila Tyson and other local activists were going door to door in Alabama, encouraging people to vote in Tuesday’s special election for Senate.

Speaking by phone Tuesday, Tyson said she had feared the grassroots push to get out black votes wouldn’t work. She had assumed some people would forget, or just stay home. But then, she saw the long lines forming at polling places around her city and car after car pulling up to go vote.

Republican Roy Moore has refused to concede the Alabama Senate special election, telling his supporters to realize “when the vote is this close that it’s not over.”

Moore was at least 20,000 votes behind Jones by the end of Tuesday evening, and multiple news outlets called the election for Jones shortly before 10:30 pm Eastern time.

Deep-red Alabama has elected a Democrat to the US Senate for the first time in 25 years: Civil rights attorney Doug Jones will be going to Washington after defeating Republican Roy Moore.

For much of the race, Jones lived in Moore’s shadow. Even before Moore was embroiled in a sexual misconduct scandal, he was known for his fundamentalist and far-right Christian views on same-sex marriage and abortion — as well as his opposition to Muslims serving in government and his belief that portions of the country are already under Sharia law.

Tonight, Alabama did not elect a man accused of preying on children who thinks Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress. That’s not the highest bar I can imagine for a democracy to clear, but I’m glad we cleared it.

But tonight’s election results do not leave me comfortable with the state of American politics. If Moore had merely been a candidate who believed Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to serve in Congress, that the laws of the United States of America should be superseded by his interpretation of the Bible, that homosexuality should be illegal, he would have won in a landslide. Even multiple credible reports that Moore serially preyed on teenage girls were barely enough to lose him the election.

Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore on Tuesday in the Alabama special election. The deep-red state hasn’t sent a Democrat to the Senate in more than two decades, but Jones edged out a victory — even if the sexual misconduct allegations against Moore made it an atypical Alabama race.

Jones celebrated his victory with his supporters — though Moore has not yet conceded the election. Read the rush transcript below:

Doug Jones’s shocking victory in Alabama’s Senate special election is a tremendous humiliation for former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who had made Moore’s candidacy the centerpiece of his effort to reshape the Republican Party.

And Bannon’s enemies — Republican congressional leaders and their allies, and conservatives who’ve long been skeptical of President Donald Trump — are wasting no time in blaming him for it.

The easy thing for Republicans to tell themselves after the stinging loss of a Senate seat in Alabama is that they only went down to defeat because the party had the misfortune to nominate someone accused of preying on teenage girls.

And there is something to that. But the Republican Party nominated a man accused of sexual misconduct to run for president in 2016, and that didn’t stop him from winning 62 percent of the vote in Alabama. Donald Trump didn’t just win Alabama a year ago — he won by a larger margin than Mitt Romney, John McCain, or George W. Bush. So while it’s undoubtedly true that the allegations played a role in the race, they hardly work as a comprehensive explanation of the outcome.

Doug Jones’s shocking upset victory in Alabama — Fox News and the Associated Press have both called the race for him — has an enormous upside for Democrats. It gives them their first realistic chance of retaking the US Senate in 2018. And if they manage to pull that off, the consequences for the future of Donald Trump’s presidency will be enormous.

Once Jones is sworn in, the 52-48 Republican majority will shrink to just 51-49. This means that Democrats will have to gain, on net, just two seats, rather than three, to retake control of the chamber.

For the first time since 1992, a Democrat has won a US Senate election in Alabama.

It’s a stunning reversal in one of the reddest states in the union, made possible not so much by the strength of the Democratic candidate but by the astonishing weakness of the Republican nominee. A glib commentator might conclude that all the election shows is that a Democrat can win a federal election in Alabama if his opponent has been fired from the state Supreme Court twice for misconduct and faces multiple credible accusations of preying on teenage girls.

Doug Jones has won the Alabama special election, according to multiple news outlets, the first Democrat in the state elected to the US Senate in more than 20 years. He delivers the Democrats a coveted Senate seat, shaving the GOP majority to 51.

Jones defeated controversial Republican candidate Roy Moore. Moore, a former chief justice on the Alabama Supreme Court, has courted controversy throughout his career, but retained a loyal base of conservative and evangelical followers that seemed likely to carry him safely to a Senate victory in deep-red Alabama.

“Dear Alabama,” Twitter users from the other 49 states wrote on Tuesday, a social media plea directed to Alabamians to vote in the special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The race gained national scrutiny after several women accused Republican candidate Roy Moore, a far-right conservative and former state Supreme Court judge, of sexual misconduct, including one who said Moore groped her when she was 14 years old and he was in his 30s.

A deluge of news in recent weeks, including the contentious election involving evangelical judge Roy Moore and President Donald Trump’s decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem has quite a few evangelicals on edge.

Many are taking to Twitter to process their thoughts through the hashtag #RaptureAnxiety, which explores the many ways in which evangelicals have experienced anxiety or trauma around narratives of the “rapture.” An anxiety that includes other harbingers of the “end times” associated with a particular strain of American evangelical Christianity, and that — for many — has been compounded by some of the last week’s political events.

CNN anchor Jake Tapper described it as “a yes-or-no question” for Roy Moore, Alabama’s Republican Senate candidate: “Does he think that homosexual conduct should be illegal?”

Ted Crockett, a spokesperson for Moore, gave a simple answer: “Probably.”

An Alabama special election with enormous import for the closely divided US Senate remains a tight race, with the president of the United States openly backing a candidate accused of sexual misconduct as the rest of his party grapples with how to respond to the allegations against Roy Moore.

Voters headed to the polls Tuesday, December 12.

It’s entirely possible that deeply conservative Alabama could end up electing a Democrat to the Senate for the first time in 25 years — so progressive groups and Democrats across the country have poured a ton of time and money into Tuesday’s special election.

Democratic nominee Doug Jones has raised the most money by far. The Birmingham lawyer has raised $11.5 million in individual contributions since May — more than double the $5.2 million raised by Republican nominee Roy Moore, according to federal campaign finance data.