Democrates Wins Alabama Senate Race

Doug Jones, a Democratic former prosecutor who mounted a seemingly quixotic Senate campaign in the face of Republican dominance here, defeated his scandal-scarred opponent, Roy S. Moore, after a brutal campaign marked by accusations of sexual abuse and child molestation against the Republican, according to The Associated Press.

The upset delivered an unimagined victory for Democrats and shaved Republicans’ unstable Senate majority to a single seat.

Mr. Jones’s victory could have significant consequences on the national level, snarling Republicans’ legislative agenda in Washington and opening, for the first time, a realistic but still difficult path for 

Democrats to capture the Senate next year. It amounted to a stinging snub of President Trump, who broke with much of his party and fully embraced Mr. Moore’s candidacy, seeking to rally support for him in the closing days of the campaign.

Amid thunderous applause from his supporters at a downtown hotel, Mr. Jones held up his victory as a message to Washington from voters fed up with political warfare. For once, he said, Alabama had declined to take “the wrong fork” at a political crossroads.

“We have shown the country the way that we can be unified,” Mr. Jones declared, draping his election in the language of reconciliation and consensus. “This entire race has been about dignity and respect. This campaign has been about the rule of law.”

Mr. Trump and Republican activists would most likely have opposed such a measure, setting up a potentially drastic, months long clash within the Republican Party, now averted thanks to Mr. Jones.

Still, that relief comes at a steep price. 

Before the election in Alabama, Republicans were heavily favored to keep control of the Senate in 2018, when Democrats must defend 25 seats, including 10 in states that Mr. Trump carried in 2016. Just two or three Republican-held seats appear vulnerable, in Arizona, Nevada and Tennessee.

But after Mr. Jones is sworn in, Republicans will control only 51 seats, creating a plausible route for Democrats to take over.

If the election burst into the national consciousness in early November, with the sex-abuse claims against Mr. Moore, it was an intensifying political migraine for Republican leader’s months before then. 

Mr. Trump’s decision to pluck Mr. Sessions from the Senate in early 2017 touched off a grim comedy of errors for the party, involving two Alabama governors, a Senate appointment widely seen as tainted by corruption, a rescheduled special election and a botched attempt by national Republican donors to crush dissent in the Republican primary.

For all their efforts, party leaders were rewarded with Mr. Moore, whom they grudgingly embraced in the early fall  just in time for a scandal of unmatched luridness to appear.

source:NYtimes