Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama on Tuesday scored an upset win in a deeply Republican state, capturing the U.S. Senate seat in a special election that drove a wedge within the Republican party and gave Democrats another burst of momentum ahead of the 2018 midterm races, The Wall Street Journal reports.
The result was the second potent signal—after Democrats swept the Virginia Legislature races a month ago—that Democratic enthusiasm in the 2018 midterms could produce the sort of election wave that could flip control of Congress.
Jones, a 63-year-old former federal prosecutor, is the first Democrat that Alabamians have sent to the U.S. Senate in more than two decades.
His pending arrival in the nation’s capital will trim the GOP’s Senate majority to a slim 51-49, loosening the Republicans’ grip on power in the chamber after a year of struggling to give President Donald Trump’s agenda a legislative boost. The GOP attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed earlier this year by one vote because of defections within its own ranks.
The Jones victory also puts the Democrats one seat closer to picking up a majority in the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections. They had needed a net gain of three seats to get to 51 seats, a target that had been hard for them to envision reaching. But after the Jones win, they only need a net gain of two seats, and there are two GOP seats ripe for flipping—in Arizona and Nevada.
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