Roy Moore Is Staying Home

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Roy Moore lost. Thank goodness. The United States Senate will not have among its members a proud anti-Muslim, anti-gay bigot who is the subject of multiple credible accusations of molestation.

The politicians who supported Moore, starting with President Trump, and those who silently refused to condemn him, including many congressional Republicans, will forever be stained by doing so. They supported a man who rejects American values. They also supported a man who managed to lose what should have been an easy Republican win.

The immediate implication of Doug Jones’s victory is that the Republican margin in the Senate will shrink to just two votes once Jones is sworn in, sometime in the next several weeks. This means the party can lose only one of its members and still pass legislation (with the vice president breaking a tie).

Republicans will now be in even more of a rush to pass their tax plan. I hope the Alabama result causes at least a few of them to reflect on the folly of passing an unpopular bill that increases the deficit and hurts the middle class. Only two more Republican “no” votes can keep it from passing — and the plan violates the stated principles of at least three Republican senators (Susan Collins, Jeff Flake and John McCain).

McCain, who cares about process, in particular may want to think back to what the Democratic leader, Harry Reid, announced the day after the 2010 special election in Massachusetts — a Democratic defeat as shocking as last night’s Republican defeat. “We’re going to wait until the new senator arrives until we do anything more on health care,” Reid said.

The Alabama result also means that the Democrats have a path to a Senate majority next year, if they can hold their own seats and win two of the races among Arizona, Nevada and Tennessee. As Nate Cohn said on Twitter:

Alex Burns of The Times has an excellent Twitter summary of the Republicans’ many strategic errors in Alabama. They included the appointment of a tainted temporary senator and the decision to drive a House member who might have won out of the race. If you’re of the age to remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books, you’ll enjoy reading the full Burns thread. Also on Twitter, Al Giordano hailed — and explained — the N.A.A.C.P.’s get-out-the-vote efforts. And Jamil Smith said:

The Upshot’s election-returns page received a lot of deserved praise last night, and it was by far the best way to watch the results. It was well ahead of the television coverage. But I think it’s important to emphasize that the Upshot estimate wasn’t “right” because it showed Jones as having a greater than 50 percent chance of winning most of the night. Sometimes, events with a probability of less than 50 percent will happen, and that doesn’t make the probability “wrong.”

Those of us who enjoy data still have work to do to make this case more persuasively. There is a widespread — and fundamentally incorrect — belief that a probability of 60 percent or 75 percent or 90 percent means it’s gonna happen. It does not, any more than a die is broken if it rolls a one. Sometimes, a candidate with a 62 percent chance of winning well into election night (as Jones had for a time last night) will lose. Otherwise, the percentage wouldn’t be merely 62.

(Disclosure: I was The Upshot’s founding editor and worked on it until 2015.)