Alabama's Senate race was highly unusual on a number of levels, but the demographic trends that ultimately delivered the seat to Democrats represent a larger trend that threatens the GOP's future.
Roy Moore's base voters were more white, male, old, and religious than future demographics are trending—by a lot. The Washington Post has a good look at both where America's future is headed demographically and who voted for Moore based on preliminary exit polls.
This is what the future holds:
Phillip Bump writes:
Older — but less white and, importantly, less religious. In other words, it will in significant ways look much less like the voters who supported Roy Moore than those who supported the Democrat, Doug Jones. Two-thirds of Jones’s support was nonwhite. Six-in-10 Jones voters were women. In fact, about a third of Jones’s support came from black women alone.
Naturally, the lion’s share of Moore’s votes came from voters who were white and evangelical (cuz protecting fetuses is apparently more important than providing health care to children through CHIP funding or protecting them from child molesters).
Fully 92 percent of Moore voters were white, with 52 percent of his vote coming from white men, in particular (yes, black voters and especially female black voters saved the day).
And nearly three-quarters of Moore voters were evangelical (whose numbers are also disproportionately high in Alabama, compared to the rest of the nation).
Just to put a point on that evangelical vote: white women almost evenly broke for/against Moore based on whether they identified as evangelical or not.
Anyway, talking demographic shifts isn’t anything new. It was all the rage in the run up to 2016 before a sliver of some 70,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin threw the electoral college to Trump.
But the trend lines we are now seeing in Virginia and Alabama are reigniting talk of a demographic collapse for the Republican Party.
It should likewise be shining a spotlight on how crucial it is to concentrate on turning out base voters—people of color and African Americans, in particular—who overwhelmingly vote Democratic if they are given a good reason to go to the polls.
Doug Jones gave them a good reason in Alabama, and they came through.
