Six take-aways from Doug Jones’ stunning win in Alabama’s Senate race

A Democrat will now hold Jeff Sessions's Senate seat in Alabama.

Doug Jones's victory on Tuesday is every bit as shocking as when a Republican won the late Ted Kennedy's seat in a Massachusetts special election seven years ago. Scott Brown's upset was the harbinger of massive GOP gains in 2010, including the takeover of the House.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Jones won 49.9 percent of the vote to Republican Roy Moore's 48.4 percent. The other 1.7 percent wrote in someone else's name.

Moore has refused to concede defeat and suggested that he might seek a recount, but the Alabama Republican Party said it won't support such a long-shot effort. The father of the White House press secretary colorfully called on Moore to throw in the towel Wednesday morning:

Gov. Mike Huckabee tweeted 'Roy Moore won't concede; says will wait on God to speak. God wasn't registered to vote in AL but the ppl who voted did speak and it wasn't close enough for recount. In elections everyone does NOT get a trophy. I know first hand but it's best to exit with class.'

Here are six take-aways from the returns:

1. Alabama has now rejected President Trump twice in three months.

Trump got 62 percent of the vote there last year, but exit polls showed that just 48 percent of voters on Tuesday approved of his job performance as president.

The president flew to Alabama in September to campaign for Luther Strange, who was appointed to fill Sessions's seat when he became attorney general. But Strange got crushed.

To be sure, Trump's eleventh hour intervention was helpful to Moore. He recorded a robocall and praised the former chief justice of the state Supreme Court at a rally last Friday night. Among people who made up their mind about who to support since the start of December, which was 21 percent of voters, Moore won by 12 points (54-42). Jones led by seven points (53-46) among those who decided before then.

But POTUS no longer has enough juice with the GOP base to drag Moore across the finish line. Half of voters said Trump was not a factor in determining their vote, while 27 percent said they voted for Moore to show support for the president and 19 percent said they voted for Jones to express their opposition to him.

Trump was initially gracious in defeat Tuesday night.

He tweeted 'Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!'

Wednesday morning he tweeted that Moore's loss vindicated his endorsement of Strange in the primary:

Trump tweeted 'The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election. I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!'

— 'Trump had obsessed over the race in recent days, including asking associates last weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort about Moore and his chances,' per The Post's Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker. 'The president watched the race unfold Tuesday night after a quick holiday party at the White House, devouring the results on television and receiving updates from his political team. He was joined by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, who stayed with the president at the White House well into the evening and took updates from the staff to pass along ...

'By late Tuesday night, aides had already begun guessing where the mercurial Trump would hurl the blame — and how he would distance himself from Moore ... One White House official also said the consensus among some in the West Wing was that [Mitch] McConnell deserved more blame than [Steve] Bannon — or Trump. McConnell, this person said, cut off money to Moore, told voters that their candidate would face an ethics investigation, encouraged others to criticize him and tried to change the whole election ... As the results rolled in, some aides worked to ready talking points ... But many of Trump's advisers who were skeptical of Moore were at Il Canale in Georgetown, attending a holiday party thrown by Gary Cohn, Trump's chief economic adviser and a registered Democrat.'

2. Alabamians, black and white, did not want to be embarrassed. Moore played right into every negative stereotype of Dixie that most Alabamians resent.

'Every single county swung left compared to 2016, with some moving more than 15 points,' per The Post's Kim Soffen, Dan Keating, Kevin Schaul and Kevin Uhrmacher. 'Moore lost 12 counties that Trump won. Moore underperformed Trump's results by 14 percentage points in the North and Central region, by 9 points in the Black Belt and by 11 points in Southern Alabama. Typically reliable and sizable Republican wins in the rural North and South of the state evaporated into razor thin margins. Between that and an increased margin in the Black Belt, Jones was able to eke out a 21,000-vote victory, while Republicans normally win by more than half a million votes ...

'These swings can be seen in counties majority white and black, Republican and Democrat. And that means it couldn't have just been a surge in African American turnout, or just rural Trump voters staying home, or just Republicans crossing over to vote for Jones. Jones' campaign was able to achieve a combination of the three that drove him to victory. Despite it being an off-year special election in December, Jones got 92 percent of Hillary Clinton's vote total. Moore just got 49 percent of Trump's.'

Exit polls demonstrated the class divide that I explored in Monday's 202: Jones won college graduates by 11 points (54-43), while Moore won non-college graduates by five points (52-47). Moore led by almost 50 points among white women without degrees, but he was neck-and-neck with Jones with white women who went to college.

There was a stark generational divide that mirrored the tension in the race between Alabama's future and its past. Mitt Romney won among Alabama voters under 45 in 2012. On Tuesday, Jones beat Moore by 22 percent among this group — which accounted for 13 percent of the electorate. The older the voter, the higher the likelihood that they supported Moore. He pulled 59 percent among those 65 and over, 51 percent among those 45 to 64, and 38 percent among 30-to-44-year-olds.

3. The GOP civil war will rage on.

The past few weeks offered a gut-check litmus test for Republicans, as Trump embraced a candidate who had been credibly accused of predatory, sexual behavior toward teenage girls when he was a district attorney in his 30s.

Leaders from the establishment wing seized on the results as evidence that the party must reject Bannonism. 'It should be a hurricane siren for every Republican,' said Josh Holmes, a former top aide to McConnell. 'This is what the death of a party looks like, and without an immediate course correction and rejection of the Steve Bannon view of the world, you can lose races in states like Alabama ... If I had the top five Republican minds in politics and we spent three months attempting to conceive of a way to lose an Alabama Senate race, I'm not sure that we could come up with it. You could literally take any name out of a phone book except Roy Moore's and win by double digits. And we managed to get the only guy in Alabama that could lose to a Democrat.'

Steven Law, another former McConnell chief of staff who runs the Senate Leadership Fund, ripped into Bannon in a news release: 'Not only did Steve Bannon cost us a critical Senate seat in one of the most Republican states in the country, but he also dragged the president of the United States into his fiasco,' he said.

Holmes and Law hope that Moore's loss makes it easier for more electable candidates to fend off Bannonites in GOP primaries next year in Arizona and Nevada. 'This is now the sixth Senate seat that Republicans have lost since 2010 with deeply flawed candidates winning contested primaries, but it is easily the biggest upset given how conservative Alabama is,' The Post's Paul Kane reports.

'Many Republicans will privately be pleased to see Bannon and even Trump get their comeuppance. But that doesn't resolve the split within the party over the direction it should take,' The Post's Dan Balz writes. 'As long as Trump is president, this is the division and the reality that Republicans will live with — an uneasy coalition at best.'

GOP traditionalists believe Tuesday night's results will help their party regain some of the dignity it has lost in the Trump era. They are pleased that he will not join the GOP conference in the Senate, which they're certain would have meant constant headaches.

Jeff Flake tweeted 'Decency wins'

John Kasich tweeted 'Thankfully, today enough Republicans chose country over party. Tomorrow we must redouble our efforts to support candidates worthy of the office they seek.#TwoPaths'

Many credited Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., for going on TV to say he believed the accusers and couldn't vote for Moore in good conscience.

Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee's brand took a big hit. Ronna Romney McDaniel, who stopped using her maiden name this year at Trump's request (because the president doesn't like her relative Mitt Romney), demonstrated that she's a weak chair by going along with Trump's request to reopen the spigots for Moore despite her private reservations.

4. The Democratic path to winning the Senate next year just got easier, but it remains a heavy lift.

The Post's Aaron Blake explains: 'At the start of the cycle, the math for Democrats winning the Senate majority in 2018 — even in a very good environment — appeared prohibitive. They had only two bona fide pickup opportunities, they needed three pickups, and they had to defend 10 swing and red states that President Trump won. The map was just brutal. But since then, they've gotten the news they need to at least put the Senate in play. Potential takeovers in Arizona and Nevada look increasingly promising. An open seat has popped up in Tennessee, where last week Democrats landed popular former Governor Phil Bredesen as a candidate, and now they've nabbed one of the three pickups they needed a year early in Alabama. The math still is tough, but it's clearly within the realm of possibility now. And with Democrats claiming a double-digit lead on the generic ballot, things are very much looking up.'

5. Losing this seat will make it harder for Republicans to advance their legislative agenda.

Alabama's secretary of state expects the election to be certified between Dec. 27 and Jan. 3, per The Post's Michael Scherer. That gives Republicans two weeks to pass their tax cuts with a 52-to-48 majority. Once Jones gets seated, they can only afford two GOP defections — with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tiebreaking vote — instead of three.

'And other big potential Republican priorities for 2018 — including potential bills to boost infrastructure spending and cut back on entitlement programs — are now in limbo as every last vote comes under the election-year spotlight,' The Post's Mike DeBonis notes. 'Barring a new effort at bipartisan deal making that has been largely absent so far under the Trump administration, the GOP appears on track to head into the November midterms with only one major accomplishment to tout: a tax-cut bill that has polled poorly and delivers most of its direct benefit to corporations and the wealthy.'

6. Moore's loss underscores the potency of sexual misconduct allegations and the power of the #MeToo moment.

Tuesday felt, in some ways, like the reckoning that never fully materialized after the emergence of the 'Access Hollywood' tape in October 2016, The Post's Karen Tumulty writes. 'But the sense of grievance remained, and gained force this fall with the toppling of movie producer Harvey Weinstein and the once-revered figures in media and politics who have been taken down in his wake. [Jones's] unlikely victory may also be a sign that the formula for winning in a deeply polarized political climate, perfected by Trump, may not be so reliable as it seemed.'

Voters were split on the credibility of the accusations against Moore, which he categorically denied: 51 percent said they were definitely or probably true, and 44 percent said they were definitely or probably false.

'Even one-party states have their limits,' The Post's David Von Drehle writes. 'There was a Louisiana politician in the politically incorrect days of 1983, a man equal parts corrupt and quotable named Edwin Edwards, who said the only way he could lose an election 'is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.' Horrible. Pushed to the wall, Alabama Republicans responded with Moore's Law: Getting caught with live girls is fatal, too.'

From the communications director of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.:

Lily Adams tweeted 'Let this sink in — Jefferson Beauregard Sessions' Senate seat was taken by a civil rights lawyer who convicted Klansmen. Justice is sweet.'