Today is the big day in Alabama. My prediction remains that child sex predator Roy Moore will win. I haven't consulted the latest polls, I just feel that the Deep South never fails to disappoint. Electing child sex predator Roy Moore is the most disappointing thing they could do, and therefore most predictable outcome. Especially given bigly bigly support from Mr Grab 'em this past week.
By golly! Delighted to be wrong! Alabama failed to disappoint!
I saw Moore leading and saw headlings about voter suppression in predominately black areas, and figured it was the same movie we've seen before. I left to obtain snuggles, I came home, and find this. Amazing!
So, while I had felt like having Moore win would have actually been a good outcome for the Democrats in the sense that he'd have been a highly visible reminder of what the Republicans and Trump really stand for, I think that Moore losing is also a good outcome-- especially since Trump, Bannon, and Breitbart went all-in on endorsing Moore. Watching Moore lose after Trump pleaded for Alabama to vote for him has to burn Trump's ego, bigly.
A couple of things I noticed:
-an unusually high number of write-in votes. Several prominent Republicans had suggested voters who couldn't stomach Moore but couldn't vote Democrat should cast write-in votes for somebody other than Roy Moore. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, had suggested that Luther Strange, who lost the Primary to Moore, should campaign as a write-in. Murkowski herself won her seat in the Senate in a landslide as a write-in candidate after she had been "primaried" by a Tea Party nutjob. Strange chose not to. Thousands of people voted for U of Alabama "Crimson Tide" football coach Nick Saban instead. Nick Saban apparently finished 3rd in this election. Roll Tide! If you go through the results county-by-county, you find that in Democrat-leaning counties there were low numbers ( under 0.5%) of write-in votes, but in Republican-leaning counties there were a high number (over 1.5%) of write-ins. It seems like the write-in phenomenon is correlated with Republican areas. Considering the margin of victory was about 21,000 votes, and there were over 22,000 write-in votes, these Republicans-with-a-conscience were a deciding factor here.
-the other deciding factor, apparently, is black voters. I am reading that there was exceptionally high turnout from black voters. I am sure that you will hear speculation about "voter fraud in urban areas" (or similar dog-whistle language) in upcoming days from right-wing sources.
Black voters tend to lean Democrat to start with, but in addition to that Jones is a former prosecutor who put KKK members in jail for firebombing a black church, while Moore is a notorious crank who has said things were better back in the days of slavery. So aside from the child sex predator accusations, black voters had extra reason to dislike Moore.
But I am also wondering if Trump provided extra motivation for black voters to get out and vote. Trump has been attacking black athletes almost weekly, and while I'm sure that fires up his base, I think maybe we saw it fire up the Democrat base this time. Once he jumped into the race to support Moore, I bet that riled up people who are sick of Trump's antics, and maybe that's a big reason why they got unusually high black turnout this time. I'm picturing a black guy just relaxing watching Monday Night Football after a hard day of work, getting interrupted by a robo-call, and it's Trump's obnoxious voice telling him to vote for Roy Moore... and I'm picturing that guy thinking to himself "this is the last straw.
**** this orange
****. I'm voting this time."
Somebody on Reddit posted "See? This is what happens when us blacks get out to vote. You're welcome, America."
-k
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