Once a Long Shot, Democrat Doug Jones Wins Alabama Senate Race
Doug Jones Tops Roy Moore in Alabama Senate Race
Doug Jones addressed supporters
Tuesday night after a major upset over Roy S. Moore, the scandal-plagued
former judge, in Alabama’s heated Senate race.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS.
Photo by Bob Miller for The New York Times.
Watch in Times Video »
BIRMINGHAM,
Ala. — 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 tweeted his congratulations to Mr. Jones “on a hard fought victory.”
“The
people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot
at this seat in a very short period of time,” he wrote. “It never
ends!”
Propelled
by a backlash against Mr. Moore, an intensely polarizing former judge
who was accused of sexually assaulting young girls, Mr. Jones overcame
the state’s daunting demographics and deep cultural conservatism. His
campaign targeted African-American voters with a sprawling, muscular
turnout operation, and appealed to educated white voters to turn their
backs on the Republican Party.
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Those
pleas paid off on Tuesday, as precincts in Birmingham and its suburbs
handed Mr. Jones overwhelming margins while he also won convincingly in
Huntsville and other urban centers. The abandonment of Mr. Moore by
affluent white voters, along with strong support from black voters,
proved decisive, allowing Mr. Jones to transcend Alabama’s rigid racial
polarization and assemble a winning coalition. And solidifying Mr.
Jones’s victory were the Republican-leaning residents who chose to write
in the name of a third candidate rather than back one of the two major
party nominees. More than 20,000 voters here cast write-in ballots,
which amounted to 1.7 percent of the electorate - about the same as Mr.
Jones’s overall margin.
To
progressive voters, Mr. Jones’s victory was a long-awaited rejection of
the divisive brand of politics that Alabama has inevitably rewarded
even as some of its Southern neighbors were turning to more moderate
leaders.
At
a party for Mr. Jones, Sue Bell Cobb, a former chief judge of the
Alabama Supreme Court, said that he had overcome a culture of “toxic
partisanship,” reaching out to Republicans and electrifying restive
Democrats.
“Never
has there been this level of civic engagement,” said Ms. Cobb, who is
planning to run for governor next year. “Never has it happened.”
She
was drowned out by a raucous cry from her fellow Democrats and clasped
her hands to her face as she saw on a huge projection screen that Mr.
Jones had pulled ahead. Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham, a newly
inaugurated Democrat standing just feet away, beamed as returns from his
city helped put Mr. Jones over the top.
“It feels great,” he said with undisguised elation. “It sends a message not just to America but to the world.”
The
campaign, originally envisioned as a pro forma affair to fill the
Senate seat left vacant by Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general, developed in its final months into a referendum on Alabama’s identity, Mr. Trump’s political influence and the willingness of hard-right voters to tolerate a candidate accused of preying on teenage girls.
Mr. Jones, 63, best known for prosecuting two Ku Klux Klansmen responsible for bombing Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church
in 1963, offered himself chiefly as a figure of conciliation. He vowed
to pursue traditional Democratic policy aims, in areas such as education
and health care, but also pledged to cross party lines in Washington
and partner with Senator Richard C. Shelby, the long-tenured Alabama
Republican, to defend the state’s interests.
Mr.
Moore did little in the general election to make himself more
acceptable to conventional Republicans. To the extent he delivered a
campaign message, it was a rudimentary one, showcasing his support for
Mr. Trump and highlighting Mr. Jones’s party affiliation. But after facing allegations in early November that he sexually abused a 14-year-old girl and pursued relationships with other teenagers, Mr. Moore became a scarce presence on the campaign trail.
On
election night, as the results came in from Alabama’s cities and Mr.
Moore’s lead evaporated, the mood at the candidate’s election night
party in Montgomery darkened. A saxophonist played a slow rendition of
“Amazing Grace,” and the crowd quieted as the results from The New York
Times website posted on a projection screen turned toward Mr. Jones.
Taking
the stage over an hour after The Associated Press called the race, Mr.
Moore refused to concede and instructed a subdued crowd to “wait on God
and let this process play out.”
“Go home and sleep on it,” he told supporters.
The
election is a painful setback for Republicans in Washington, who have
already struggled to enact policies of any scale and now face even
tougher legislative math. Mr. Moore’s success in the Republican primary
here, and the subsequent general-election fiasco, may deter mainstream
Republicans from seeking office in 2018 and could prompt entrenched
incumbents to consider retirement.
But
there is also a measure of relief for some party leaders that Mr. Moore
will not join the chamber, carrying with him a radioactive cloud of
scandal. A number of Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky, the majority leader, had indicated that Mr. Moore would face
an ethics investigation if he were elected, and possibly expulsion from
the Senate.
Mr.
Trump and Republican activists would most likely have opposed such a
measure, setting up a potentially drastic, monthslong 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 leaders 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.
The Washington Post reported in early November
that Mr. Moore, while a local prosecutor in his 30s, had made sexual
overtures to four teenage girls, one of whom was 14 at the time of their
encounter. Other women soon stepped forward to say Mr. Moore had made
advances on them, too, one of whom accused him of committing sexual
assault.
National
Republican officials abandoned Mr. Moore’s campaign. Yet after it
appeared that Mr. Moore remained viable, Mr. Trump offered a
Thanksgiving week defense of the candidate and urged the people of
Alabama to oppose Mr. Jones.
Mr. Trump’s intervention helped stabilize Mr. Moore’s campaign. When the president made the case for the Republican’s candidacy
at a Friday rally in the Gulf Coast town of Pensacola, Fla., just over
the Alabama border, Mr. Jones’s campaign saw its internal polling
advantage dissipate.
Yet the conclusion of the campaign was largely to Mr. Jones’s benefit.
Mr.
Jones raised $10.2 million in just over a month and a half, and
third-party groups augmented his candidacy, helping him finance an
extensive voter turnout effort after he had dominated the state’s
airwaves for weeks.
He
raced across Alabama with a handful of out-of-state surrogates and one
local celebrity, the basketball star Charles Barkley, in the election’s
last days, focusing his attention on cities, college towns and heavily
black communities.
Mr.
Moore, instead of facing questions about accusations of sexual abuse,
largely vanished from the campaign in the last week. He returned to
Alabama for a rally in the rural, southeast corner of the state on
Monday with Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.
But
the most memorable comments from the event did not come from Mr. Moore.
Rather, they emerged from Mr. Bannon, who mocked the MSNBC host Joe
Scarborough, a University of Alabama graduate, for not attending a more
prestigious school; Mr. Moore’s wife, Kayla, who angrily denied charges
the couple was anti-Semitic by noting “one of our attorneys is a Jew;”
and an Army friend of the candidate, who recalled the two of them being
uneasy walking into a Vietnam brothel to find “pretty girls” whom Mr.
Moore found too young.
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