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As Democrats add Senate seat, GOP left to bicker over what happened in Alabama
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Jones wins U.S. Senate seat in Alabama; Moore refuses to concede
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Democrat Doug Jones on Dec. 12 defeated Republican Roy Moore in Alabama’s U.S. Senate special election. Moore refused to concede defeat. (Alice Li, Jordan Frasier, Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
By Sean Sullivan, Elise Viebeck, David Weigel and Michael Scherer
December 13 at 8:24 AM
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — As Democrats celebrated a stunning Senate win in Alabama, Republicans picked through the wreckage Wednesday after a blow that showcased voter backlash to sexual misconduct allegations and the limits of President Trump’s political influence.
Doug Jones’s victory in a part of the Deep South that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1992 was a dramatic repudiation of his opponent, Roy Moore, a former state judge twice removed from office.
Supported by former Trump chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, Moore responded to allegations that he made sexual advances toward teenagers when he was in his 30s by describing his campaign as a “spiritual battle” against Washington’s Republican and Democratic leaders.
Democrats called for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to immediately seat Jones. Meanwhile, Republicans — still smarting from their defeat — began pointing fingers at one another.
“After Alabama disaster GOP must do right thing and DUMP Steve Bannon,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a critic of the GOP’s ultraconservative wing, wrote on Twitter.
Trump’s former deputy campaign manager, David N. Bossie, suggested the Republican National Committee had been wrong to cut ties with Moore before changing course and lending support again earlier this month.
“I do put blame on a lot of folks that pulled out their support and came back in late,” Bossie told Fox News.
Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) laid the blame for the outcome with McConnell, who backed Moore’s primary opponent in the special election needed to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“Mitch McConnell should have stayed out of this race,” Byrne said in an interview with MSNBC. “If he would have, we would have a Republican senator coming out instead of a Democratic one.”
Jones’s victory portended the head winds facing Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections, coming just a month after a historic Republican wipeout in the battleground state of Virginia. With Jones in office, Democrats will have a credible, if still difficult, path to retake control of the Senate two years into Trump’s term.