Blow for Republicans as US red state Alabama turns blue
WASHINGTON: Voters in the solidly Republican US state of Alabama have delivered a stinging blow to President Donald Trump by electing a Democrat over a Republican candidate for the Senate, 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.
With all 67 counties having reported by yesterday, the margin of victory was just over 1.5 percentage points, with Jones winning 49.92% to 48.38% for Moore. Voter turnout was about 40.5% per cent.
“Write-in” candidates – where the voter adds a name to the ballot paper – won 1.7% of the votes, playing a significant role, a fact noted by Trump in a tweet .
“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 just 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, who becomes the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Alabama in 25 years.
The candidate thanked African Americans who supported him along with Latino voters and Jews who backed him, saying he has always believed “that the people of Alabama have more in common than divide us.” On Monday, Jones won a key endorsement from former president Barack Obama.
The decades-old allegations against Moore were reported by several women.
Some said he molested them as teenagers. Moore denied any illegal behaviour.
Moore has repeatedly denied the allegations that come amid a broader reckoning in the US about sexual harassment and assault against women following allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
Even before the sexual misconduct allegations, Moore had clashed with fellow Republicans and been seen as a liability for his views.
The Christian conservative had twice won election to the state’s supreme court and had twice been suspended for his hardline stance on social and religious matters.
Jones is to be sworn in next month.
Republicans will have another shot at the seat in 2020, a point that Trump noted in his reaction.
“The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time,” he said.
“It never ends!” – dpa