Skip to main content

Five takeaways from the Alabama Senate upset | TheHill

posted onDecember 13, 2017
>

Article snippet: The results of Tuesday’s shocking Alabama Senate special election will likely reverberate far beyond its borders. Democrats won a Senate seat in Alabama for the first time since 1992, with Democrat Doug Jones narrowly defeating embattled Republican Roy Moore. The unexpected victory dealt a huge blow to the GOP. MORE, who fully got behind Moore after many Republicans abandoned him following a series of sexual misconduct allegations, will take a hit with Moore’s loss. And Senate Republicans are down another vote amid their efforts to pass tax reform. Jones’s victory also has political implications ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, since Democrats can now see the Senate majority in sight.  Here are five takeaways from Alabama’s historic special election: The Jones campaign knew that they needed to boost black turnout to have a chance at an upset in a state as red as Alabama, and they got exactly that. While black voters in Alabama make up about a quarter of the eligible voting population, exit polls found that about 30 percent of the special electorate was black. And Jones, who prosecuted two Ku Klux Klan members who bombed a Birmingham black church during the Civil Rights movement, won more than 90 percent of those votes. The turnout is made all the more impressive by the lack of state party infrastructure. But local leaders in the black community picked up the slack. A new law passed by the legislature this year had the effect of expanding voting rights to fel... Link to the full article to read more

Emotional score for this article