”Democrats are jubilant—and newly confident about 2018—as Alabama delivers win on Trump’s turf,” the Washington Post headline reads. Jubilant, yes. Newly confident? Let’s try to keep it to “cautiously optimistic and with renewed energy for the fight ahead,” okay?
Long before we know what Doug Jones’s win in Alabama says about the 2018 elections, he will be in the Senate, reducing the number of votes Republicans can afford to lose as they push their bills through. That’s big:
“It’s a hard thing to generalize since Moore was such a singular figure,” said David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “The practical implication in the Senate is that the Republicans’ margin slips to 51 seats, and it’s now very difficult for [Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell to navigate. Democrats will certainly have a role to play in moderating any legislation that comes through.”
The Alabama results also throw fuel on the fire of the Republican civil war:
“You’ve got to have a good candidate and unified party. You can’t have Steve Bannon going one way with Trump and the Republican Senate committee going another way,” said Ed Rollins, an adviser to the pro-Trump Great America Alliance super PAC. “It’s going to make everything more difficult. Everyone is going to start panicking.”
There’s a lot to celebrate. There’s a lot of work to do—looking toward November 2018 and stopping the Republican tax bill now. Take a little while for jubilance, and then channel that energy into those fights and the dozens of others congressional Republicans will present us with in the coming months.