Alabama Senate special election thread of hot takes, bitter disappointment, and/or slightly possible exuberance.

Senator Shelby deserves some credit for urging Republicans to write-in a candidate, the write-in vote exceeded the margin of victory.

So THATS what the orange one’s tweet was referring to.

Another reason for optimism:

Yep, that was actually something that may have created a few thousand write-ins or encouraged a few thousand longtime Republicans to just stay home.

I think you are overthinking this.

Black men and women together made up 11%+17% of voters according to that chart. That’s 28%. Another analyst estimated they were closer to 30%. But they only make up 26% of the population.

Thus, they had a disproportionate effect on the outcome, which after all was decided by only a 1-2% margin. And they overwhelmingly supported Jones.

Surprised yet pleased at outcome. The Moore/AL threads didn’t inspire confidence.

True - but their ability to have a disproportionate effect came about from many white Republican voters deciding to stay home, right?

I’m just holding out with the hope that some of these white voters have a conscience, that’s all.

Watch out @triggercut or someone will start quoting all the things you posted before Trump’s win! I still remember all of your optimistic ‘sources’ you couldn’t tell anyone about.

Y’all be nice to trigger - at least until we get a Christmas mix out of him this year.

Yes. Stickin it to the () ftw.

I had Frank Luntz’s exit polling numbers, straight from him. I gave them out, with a caution about exit polling numbers, grains of salt, and how they can often lead to heartbreak.

And later in the evening I even mentioned who that source was (Luntz), and linked to his twitter account so folks could see that Frank was saying the same stuff early in the night and then kept changing his tune later on.

Mate the point is there’s no sense in getting snarky about wrong predictions, because we all make them from time to time. You were very confident of a Clinton win early on in the evening, not that there’s anything wrong with being optimistic, if life were longer and less interesting I would go back and find stuff but no point.

Plus most of us in P&R are talking in good faith, really. Snark towards people on social media who actually wanted the (alleged) child molester to win is a completely different story!

I have little time for pessimism even when it’s probably warranted. I find it to be a useless mindset. But when there’s no call for pessimism, I take issue.

It’s P&R. Roll with it.

And it’s not all of them were predictions. For example mine was literally paraphrasing interviews with actual black voters in Alabama that were done on NPR. Does the fact they turned out and voted for him change the tone I was hearing?

No, it does not.

I realize it’s NPR. But it’s bad reporting if they presented it as the state of the race in Alabama, and amplifying it here, I decided to call it out.

NPR were hardly the only ones.

https://twitter.com/yottapoint/status/940825720447782912

Bendery reports for the HuffPost. If she was on the ground in Alabama for this article, it seems unlikely she left the Jones campaign HQ in Birmingham.

And that bad journalism gets accepted as being factually correct. It leads to bad takes about how Democrats just are unenthused and how the party isn’t really speaking to its base, despite a whole bunch of voter data points in Virginia, New Jersey, Washington State, Oklahoma, Georgia, etc. over the last 6 weeks to the contrary.

So, I wonder how much of the Trump Effect kicker ij last night with African-Americans.

They did not turn out for Hillary, and their turnout was typical in an election featuring two white candidates.

But Trump has gone out of his way to antagonizing minorities. He’s not a politician paying lip-service to African-American issues during a campaign and then later ignoring them once in office. His constant attacks on NFL players (and most of them in his attacks are black), Colin Kaepernick, or his use of demonizing language when a person of color kills people vs the tone he adopts when, say, a white guy shoots hundreds of people in Vegas.

It’s one thing to have a white politician who is apathetic to them, but one who is outright racist hasn’t been seen in long time.

Definitely an effect, I have to believe.

But also a lot of evidence, both in Virginia and in Alabama, of candidate/party outreach on this at a ground level on registering voters, getting them to polls, and helping to pump enthusiasm.

If I’m an editor at any national media outlet – online, print, or otherwise – that covered both Virginia and Alabama, I’m asking some hard questions of my reporting staff about how they missed the levels of enthusiasm and ground work in both states until after the results had come in.

Previous polls had Alabama as one of the few regions of the country where Trump was not underwater in terms of approval rating.

If you do need some sobering pessimism this morning…;)

Jones won the senate seat with a 1.5% margin…but would’ve only carried one congressional district in the state.

Work to do. 2020 census. All that stuff.