Alabama may have just elected its first Democratic senator in 25 years, but the legislators in the chamber who feel most emboldened may sit on the Republican side of the aisle. By narrowing the Republican majority, Doug Jones’s arrival further empowers Republicans who are willing to break with the party to kill or force changes […]
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): For your consideration today: Can Republicans find a way to stop nominating toxic (perhaps fatally flawed) candidates? The immediate spark for this question is, of course, the GOP managing to lose a Senate seat in Alabama, one […]
Democrat Doug Jones’s stunning victory in Alabama on Tuesday should send a shiver down the spine of GOP elected officials everywhere. Yes, Jones likely would have lost the special election for a U.S. Senate seat had his Republican opponent, Roy Moore, not been an extremely flawed candidate. But Moore’s defeat is part of a larger […]
I’ve been covering American elections at FiveThirtyEight for almost 10 years. During that time, by far the most remarkable outcomes — of course — were Barack Obama being elected president in 2008 and Donald Trump being elected in 2016. But in third and fourth place were two special elections to the U.S. Senate: Scott Brown’s […]
On Tuesday night, Doug Jones became the first Democrat to win a Senate race in Alabama in a quarter-century. The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast team discusses the factors that converged to make that possible. You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or […]