Finally something to be happy about

I totally wasn't expecting this but Doug Jones has beaten Roy Moore in the Alabama special election for senator. This is fantastic for a number of reasons and of course has national implications.

Like I said, I wasn't expecting this, I was hoping for it but honestly I thought Jones would lose by a few points, both sides would declare victory if that happened, the GOP because they won, the Dems because they got close in a state that really shouldn't be close at all. But now I don't have to write about that, so woo.

What does this mean? Well the Republican majority in the Senate just got cut in half, which might make passing things like tax bills pretty hard once Jones is seated(more on that later), it also puts the Senate in play during the midterms in 2018, although the demographics of the election still do not favor the democrats, who would have to flip two seats without losing any, and they have a couple dozen coming up including some in some pretty red states, however there aren't a ton of states redder than Alabama, and they won there so there is at least a chance.

I would hesitate to use this election as a signal for the rest of the nation, I mean it required a half dozen women accusing Moore of sexual harassment when they were underage to put the seat in play, and honestly I am not sure the sex issue really made much of a difference in the end, at least not more than black turnout did.

Statistics will trickle in for the next few weeks, but we know that white people voted for Moore quite heavily, more than two-thirds did in fact, and we also know that of the white women who voted, almost precisely two-thirds still chose Moore, so for those who actually voted, pedophilia was not a major sticking point, what the accusations probably did was make a few Republicans stay home or go with a write in candidate, which is almost as good as a vote for Jones, but not quite. Moore has a pretty appalling record on race though, and the African American community basically voted for Jones with something like 95% casting their ballots for the Democrat. Get out the vote efforts were extremely successful with black people making almost a third of the votes in the election, in the end it was just enough and here we are.

But most other senate races won't feature an openly racist, twice fired, pedophile judge running against a man who prosecuted the KKK members who literally bombed a church, honestly it should be a national shame that there was even a discussion here. The point is the other races won't have quite the same level of good vs evil in them, and that means the single issue voters will be able to ignore the complicated things they don't like and vote simply on abortion, or gun control, or whatever without having to hear about pedophilia.

Maybe.

On the other hand, we have had a year of Trump politics and it's eroding even the bases' support right now, if the president interjects in more of the races, and the candidates set themselves up as running on Trumpist policies, then perhaps that backlash will come into play too, particularly as there will have been time for people to realize how fucked they are by the tax plan and neutrality repeals, both of which I still expect to happen.

I am cautiously optimistic though, maybe we don't get the Senate, but the House is also in play and possibly a bit more likely, if nothing else the gaps will close and that helps a lot.

Short term though I am worried, to my knowledge Moore hasn't conceded and I won't put it past him to throw all kinds of legal challenges to the election, demanding recounts, refusing to concede until every vote has been counted twice over, that sort of thing, and the Senate could chose to put us on the path to a constitutional crisis as well by declining to seat Jones when the time comes. There are more arguments saying they can't do that than ones saying they can, but there is an argument that they could at least try to make, and even delaying his seating would be damaging, I could certainly see them slow rolling it similarly to how they fucked Obama out of a Supreme Court pick, honestly does anyone still remember that? I am still furious.

We have an interesting few things to keep an eye on this holiday season, but on the whole this has been some of the best political news we have had in some time, here's looking forward to the horrifying 2AM tweet from the president casting doubt on everything, it's very exciting.