Shock as US red state Alabama turns blue
WASHINGTON: Voters in the solidly Republican US state of Alabama on Tuesday delivered a stinging blow to President Donald Trump by electing a Democrat over a Republican candidate tainted by decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls.
Doug Jones, a former US attorney in the state, pulled off a stunning upset over Roy Moore, a former state Supreme Court chief justice, according to unofficial results posted by the Alabama election authority.
With all 67 counties having reported, the margin of victory was just over 1.5 percentage points, with Jones winning 49.92% to 48.38% for Moore, according to the results. Voter turnout was about 40.5%.
Write-in candidates won 1.7% of the votes, playing a significant role, a fact noted by Trump in a tweet congratulating Jones.
“The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win,” Trump said of the narrow victory. He won Alabama by 28 percentage points in last year’s presidential election.
Jones’s victory in the special election for a vacant Senate seat means the Republican majority in the chamber will drop to one, increasing the difficulty Trump will have passing his agenda.
Moore refused to concede, saying the race was too close and telling supporters that votes were still coming in, including absentee ballots cast by members of the military.
But Secretary of State John Merrill said absentee ballots were the first to be counted. He confirmed Moore’s statement that under Alabama law a recount is mandatory if the margin of victory is half a percentage point or less.
Speaking on CNN, Merrill said he doubted the unofficial results his office had published would change.
Trump had endorsed Moore, 70, despite a scandal over allegations that he sexually abused a 14-year-old and pursued other under age girls when he was in his 30s, which had caused some members of the party to abandon him.
Jones, a 63-year-old civil rights lawyer, had never run for political office. He is best known for having successfully prosecuted two members of the Ku Klux Klan who bombed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.
The bombing killed four girls in the predominantly black congregation and helped draw attention to the struggle for civil rights for African Americans.
Jones’s achievement in that case, as well as his broader civil rights record, were considered assets in winning over black voters.
“I gotta tell you, I think that I have been waiting all my life, and now I just don’t know what to say,” Jones told supporters in his victory speech. “I am truly overwhelmed.”
Jones said Alabama voters had come to forks in the road in the past and had chosen the wrong path. “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, you took the right road,” said Jones.