Democrat Doug Jones beats Roy Moore to claim deep-red Alabama Senate seat
Filed under: News, Politics, Election
In a stunning upset, Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore in Alabama’s Senate special election Tuesday.
With 89 percent of the votes counted, the Associated Press declared Jones the winner.
Jones, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members for an infamous 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, will be the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the Senate in 20 years. He fills the seat left vacant by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
The upset will doubtless send a loud message of warning to the White House, where President Trump threw his full support behind Moore, who was a controversial figure even before multiple allegations emerged that he had pursued inappropriate relationships with teenagers as an adult. It’s also a shot in the arm for Democrats, who are hoping that anger at Trump and congressional Republicans will fuel a “wave” election in 2018, flipping the U.S. House of Representatives, and perhaps even the Senate, blue.
Moore, a former judge who was removed from office twice before running for the Senate, was hit by multiple allegations from women who said he sexually pursued them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers. One woman said Moore touched her sexually when she was 14; another said he sexually assaulted her when she was just 16 years old and he was an assistant district attorney
Moore vehemently denied the allegations, but several high-profile Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said they believed the women. Trump, however, never abandoned Moore, even cutting a robocall for him in Alabama that called Jones a “puppet of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.” Trump won the state last year by 28 points, and his failure to push Moore over the finish line could spell trouble for the unpopular president’s political strategy going forward.
Moore’s troubled candidacy unexpectedly turned deep-red Alabama into a battleground, with Moore leading his Democratic opponent by just 2 percentage points in an average of polls.
Jones’s victory also endangers Republicans’ tax reform legislation in Congress, which passed by a narrow majority in the Senate earlier this month. Both the Senate and the House will have to pass another combined version of the tax bill to send it to the president’s desk. With one fewer Republican in the chamber, McConnell can lose only one vote and still push through the bill, which has not attracted any Democratic support. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., has already voted against the legislation once, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has made several demands regarding health care that must be met before she’ll support it again. McConnell could rush the vote before Jones is seated in January, however.
Jones ran a vigorous campaign up to the end, targeting the state’s black population last weekend. He brought in Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., to stump for him. Jones also ran ads featuring prominent Republicans, including Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., disavowing Moore, in a bid to peel off conservatives.
Meanwhile, Moore lay low, holding no campaign events until a rally Monday with former White House strategist Steve Bannon.
“If you don’t believe in my character, don’t vote for me,” Moore said then.
Read more from Yahoo News:
- A state in bondage to its past confronts a difficult choice for Senate
- Allegations against Roy Moore overshadow his final campaign rally
- The women who have accused Roy Moore
- #MeAt14: Women tweet photos of when they were age Roy Moore’s accuser was
- Alabama Senate race gets even stranger as Democrat quotes Ivanka in ad