Doug Jones victory over Roy Moore an unlikely outcome in the unlikeliest of places

Reaction — much of it outspoken and at least as much of it unspoken — to Democrat Doug Jones’ unlikely victory over Republican former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in the special election to fill Alabama’s vacant U.S. Senate seat amounts to a curious and perhaps unprecedented kind of bipartisanship.

Certainly there’s nothing surprising about national Democrats’ response: It’s been a miserable year for the Donkeys, and the idea of winning a Senate seat in the “reddest” of Red states, one Donald Trump won by a landslide in the presidential election last year, was almost literally unthinkable.

Of course, once the unthinkable had become the actual, national Democrats, as is apparently dictated by their collective DNA, began overestimating the greater political significance of the Alabama election and misinterpreting its meaning for the party’s prospects in 2018 and beyond.

This was about how one particular election, under one particular set of circumstances, was won in Alabama. Columnist Froma Harrop — a New Englander, no less — gets that:

“The state party had a strong candidate in place even when the race seemed a long shot. (There's a lesson there for Democrats in all 50 states.) Democrats also had the good sense to discourage an invasion by out-of-state liberals 'splaining what's what to the locals.”

If that last sentence isn’t posted on every party headquarters wall in foot-high letters, the Blues can look forward to another 20 years in the political wilderness.

(In fact, the other campaign gets the prize for political tone-deafness: At a Monday rally for Moore, Harvard-educated white supremacist Steve Bannon mocked the schooling of MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough … who earned his degree from the University of Alabama.)

For Republicans it’s more complicated and nuanced, but still a big-picture win. GOP pols who stubbornly backed Moore could still pay a political price down the road — and they will deserve to — but he was already an albatross for the party even before the sexual misconduct allegations. Republicans don’t need this guy, and some, like Richard Shelby, the veteran Alabama senator who will be Jones’ across-the-aisle colleague, publicly announced he would not vote for him.

It is definitely not a win for the president — who, to his credit, tweeted congratulations to Jones on “a hard fought victory.” Given Trump’s obsessive contempt for “losers,” the fact that he backed two of them (Luther Strange, then Moore) in a single race has to be galling.

The speculation that Jones’ win signals a possible change in the Senate balance of power isn’t borne out by the math. As the New York Times noted Wednesday, of the 25 Senate Democrats facing election challenges next year, 10 are from states Trump won last year, while only a scant handful of Republican-held seats are considered vulnerable (the Times mentions Arizona, Nevada and Tennessee).

The bottom line: Barring an unlikely reversal, Roy Moore will not be in the U.S. Senate. May that be the epitaph of this misbegotten political career.

This story was originally published December 13, 2017 at 4:09 PM with the headline "Doug Jones victory over Roy Moore an unlikely outcome in the unlikeliest of places."