The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. It never ends!”Ĭongratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity.”Ībout an hour after Jones’ victory, Trump tweeted, “Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. Leigh Corfman and other victims are courageous heroes. Mitt Romney wrote last week that Moore would be “a stain on the GOP and on the nation. Trump’s support induced a great deal of consternation among some Republicans. Trump himself initially backed Strange, but after endorsing Moore, recorded a robocall, and on Friday held a rally for Moore in Pensacola, Fla., within the coverage area of Alabama. Moore trounced Luther Strange in the primary race, who was appointed to fill the seat and backed by McConnell and other Republicans in Washington. The mix of religious zealotry and political defiance proved to be particularly potent in the Republican primary to fill Jeff Sessions’ vacant Senate seat. More than a decade later, after he again was elected as chief justice, he came under more fire for refusing to recognize same-sex marriage despite the Supreme Court decision that legalized the nuptials. Moore rose to prominence with his controversial tenure as Alabama’s Supreme Court chief justice, from which he was removed in 2003 after he refused a federal court order to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments from the judicial building. Moore also said in 2006 that Keith Ellison should not be sworn in to Congress because Ellison is a Muslim. That is where Roy Moore is and the state of Alabama is,” Crockett said. “Homosexuality is a sin in the Biblical sense. Moore has said that homosexual relations should be illegal, and on Tuesday his spokesman Ted Crockett told CNN that he probably still believes it. On Tuesday, he rode to his polling place on horseback. them populist rhetoric that played on cultural divides. In appealing to white evangelicals, Moore mirrored Trump’s 2016 playbook by engaging in us vs. He didn’t back off of past far-right positions, characterizing them as rooted in the Biblical law. Meanwhile, Moore at times bashed McConnell with almost the same fervor as he railed against Democrats and the news media. He was backed by Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, and Trump gave him his endorsement last week. McConnell called on Moore to drop out, and when that didn’t happen, he said that Moore would face an ethics investigation.Įven before The Washington Post published its story about Moore’s accusers, Moore’s candidacy had exposed fissures in the Republican party in the era of Donald Trump. Had Moore been elected, it would have posed problems for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who would have faced the prospect of seating a candidate under a cloud of allegations of sexual misconduct, or of trying to eject him and face the wrath of the GOP electorate. Indeed, a number of Republicans saw a potential Moore victory as an existential crisis for the party and its ability to win over moderate voters in the long term. Jeff Flake (R-Arizona) said on Twitter, “Decency wins.” I said I can’t vote for Roy Moore,” Shelby said on CNN.Īfter Jones’ victory, some Republicans expressed relief. “I think, so many accusations, so many cuts, so many drip, drip, drip - when it got to the 14-year-old’s story, that was enough for me. But Shelby switched to the Republican party two years later, and earlier this week said that he didn’t vote for Moore. No Democrat has been elected to the Senate from Alabama since 1992, when Richard Shelby was re-elected to his seat. Moore denied the allegations, casting himself as the target of the media elite and a threat to the Washington establishment. Another accuser claimed that Moore sexually assaulted her when she was in her teens. He was given long odds of winning the seat, but the nature of the race changed in November, when The Washington Post published a story in which multiple women claimed that Moore pursued sexual relations with them when they were teenagers. Jones is a lawyer and former prosecutor who successfully pursued a case in 20 against two members of the Ku Klux Klan for their roles in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. “It is not over, and it is going to take some time,” he said, adding that there were still votes from the military overseas to be counted.Įxit polls showed that Jones benefited from higher-than-expected turnout in Democratic strongholds, and perhaps a greater-than-usual number of write-in votes.
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