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Originally Posted by JoeP

Some Al Jazeera commentary

Is Moore's defeat in Alabama a cause for celebration? | Racism | Al Jazeera (A: not very much)

It's Alabama.

Fact is that people are pretty predictable, and in the US, partisan polarization has made it so that there are usually less wild swings in the vote than there might be in multiparty democracies.

A Democrat barely winning in Alabama equates to a 30-point swing from the last election. For perspective, only about 83 seats in the US House are more Republican leaning than Alabama is as a whole. A uniform 30-point swing from the partisan lean in the House would give Democrats the largest Congressional majority... ever. In the history of the US House of Representatives.

It would mean despite Democrats (+Sanders and King) having 26 seats up in the Senate to the GOP only having 8, they would gain 4 to 7 seats (depending on whether you also flip WV and ND to the GOP, and whether McCain has left the senate), winning only 2 to 4 seats out of 34 to 35 senate races.

If that were the result in the the Congressional elections, there's no question this guy would see it as incredible. Many incumbent Republicans would lose by landslide margins. But since it's only one seat, he's focused on the narrow margin in a way he would not focus on individual margins in difficult seats in a general election.

Even before the child molestation allegations, Roy Moore was running about 20 pts behind Trump, which would also be amazing. That, if replicated, would result in Republicans losing about 100 seats in the House.

Roy Moore was an unusually bad candidate not just because of the pedophilia, though, and he wasn't the incumbent, so it's fair to say that Republicans probably won't do that bad (although I wouldn't underestimate the GOP base's ability to nominate nutjobs and crooks). But you don't need to do anywhere near as well as Jones did in Alabama for Democrats to win a landslide and easily retake the House.

But his narrow defeat [...]

Perhaps the tidal wave that put Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of all branches of government, has begun to recede.

Trump lost the popular vote and won the electoral college by winning three states by less than 1% (and Florida by about 1%). Republicans won the House popular vote by about 1%, and lost seats in both the House and Senate.

He calls that a "tidal wave" while considering the narrow victory in Alabama unremarkable, when it had been a landslide for Republicans in the past few elections.

But if some of the worst candidates in history can be nearly elected, it means that the backward logic and disguised appeal to pre-civil war racism and women as second class citizens without voting or property rights remain powerful and dangerous.

This part is correct, but it's also correct to note that those things are much more powerful in Alabama than in the country as a whole.

And yes, it is depressing that Alabama is like that. But in the large majority of the country, Moore would've lost in a massive landslide.