On Tuesday night, something momentous happened: The people of Alabama elected a Democratic senator for the first time in over 25 years. By the tiniest of margins — 49.9 percent to 48.4 percent — voters picked Doug Jones over disgraced judge and accused child molester Roy Moore. So there’s a lot to discuss there.
A few things to consider:
– Well, there’s the whole “48.4 percent voted for an accused child molester” part.
– Abortion played a huge role in influencing votes — Moore’s main response to the accusations that he’s a child predator was “Doug Jones kills babies!” and many of his unwavering apologists talked about how Jones supports due-date abortions and no, he does not, and also, those aren’t a thing and a lot of voters who opted for a write-in vote said they did so because they could vote neither for a child molester nor for a pro-choice Democrat.
– Exit polls show that 72 percent of white men and 63 percent of white women voted for Moore, and a staggering 93 percent of black men and 98 percent of black women voted for Jones. As liberals in and outside of Alabama thank black women for, once again, saving us from ourselves, we have to consider about damn when we’re going to stop relying on POC to carry the weight. Anecdotally, from the perspective of one white woman on the ground in Birmingham, the vast majority of black women I’ve talked to were a) pissed at the Jones campaign and the DSCC for ignoring them until the very end of the election, and not terribly interested in voting for Jones, and b) still willing to vote for Jones just because the prospect of Senator Roy Moore was so terrifying. And they came out in record numbers.
– With the number of write-in votes (1.7 percent) exceeding the difference in votes between the first two candidates (1.5 percent), the state of Alabama is required, by law, to now count all of the write-in votes. So by next Tuesday, we’ll all know if Nick Saban came in third place in the Alabama Senate special election.
So yeah, Alabama is sending a Democrat to the Senate. What’s on your mind?