As Democrats add Senate seat, GOP left to cast blame over Alabama failure

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – Stunned Republicans began casting blame Wednesday over their failure to hold a Senate seat in the Deep South, where Alabama Democrat Doug Jones stitched together just enough support amid voter backlash following accusations of sexual misconduct against his firebrand GOP rival.

Even as Republican Roy Moore – down by more than 20,000 votes in Tuesday's special election – refused to concede the race, members of the GOP began pointing fingers at one another for his defeat after being steamrolled in Virginia elections last month.

The recriminations highlighted the bitter divisions within the GOP that appear to be worsening as the party looks toward defending its Senate majority in 2018, a task made more difficult by Moore's loss and an increasingly unpopular President Trump.

The blow in Tuesday's election also highlighted voter dismay over allegations that Moore – an avowed Christian conservative – pursued romantic relationships with teenage girls while in his 30s, as well as the limits of Trump's political influence.

[Analysis: In Alabama, a lousy night for Republicans and a humiliating defeat for Trump]

Democrats celebrated their victory and called for Jones's immediate swearing-in. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers, strategists and party figures picked sides: either with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who kept his distance from Moore's campaign, or with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, who was among Moore's most ardent backers.

In a tweet, even Trump suggested that Moore had been a weak candidate, a tacit rebuke of Bannon's support.

"If last night's election proved anything, it proved that we need to put up GREAT Republican candidates to increase the razor thin margins in both the House and Senate," he wrote on Twitter.

Trump tried to defend his track record by saying he knew Moore would lose.

On cable news and social media, Republicans tried to explain away the loss – which leaves the GOP with just a one-seat majority in the Senate.

"Mitch McConnell should have stayed out of this race," conservative Rep. Bradley Byrne, R-Ala., said in an interview with MSNBC. "If he would have, we would have a Republican senator coming out instead of a Democratic one."

"After Alabama disaster GOP must do right thing and DUMP Steve Bannon," Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., wrote on Twitter, speaking for the party's establishment wing. "If we are to Make America Great Again for all Americans, Bannon must go!"

Critics blamed McConnell for supporting Sen. Luther Strange, R-Ala., in the GOP primary over more conservative candidates who might have beaten Moore in a runoff and Jones in the general election. Bannon, meanwhile, was denounced for pushing

Moore's candidacy despite allegations of sexual misconduct against the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.

Moore responded to allegations that he made sexual advances toward teenagers when he was in his 30s by describing his campaign as a "spiritual battle" against Washington's Republican and Democratic leaders.

Trump's former deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, suggested that the Republican National Committee had been wrong to cut ties with Moore before changing course and lending support again earlier this month.

"I do put blame on a lot of folks that pulled out their support and came back in late," Bossie told Fox News.

Jones's victory portended the head winds facing Republicans in the 2018 midterm elections, coming just a month after a historic Republican wipeout in the battleground state of Virginia. With Jones in office, Democrats will have a credible, if still difficult, path to retake control of the Senate two years into Trump's term.

The result could also become a factor in upcoming legislative battles, as Republicans will have one less vote in the narrowly divided Senate in 2018. Although McConnell has said that the GOP tax overhaul will be completed before the end of the year, when Jones is sworn into office, the impact of Tuesday's outcome on the ongoing debate is unknown.

Moore has shown he will not go quietly.

After the race was called by the Associated Press, Moore declined to concede defeat, saying he believed that the margin of victory could narrow enough to trigger an automatic recount. "Realize that when the vote is this close that it's not over," he said.

"We also know that God is always in control."

The Alabama Republican Party said it would not support Moore's push for a recount.

[GOP decisions put Senate seat at risk in Alabama]

Secretary of State John Merrill said after Moore spoke that even though the margin of victory stood at more than 1 percent, an automatic recount could still be ordered if a review of write-in votes and military ballots narrowed the margin of victory to less than 0.5 percent.

Merrill's office said Tuesday that the election will be certified between Dec. 27 and Jan. 3, giving Republicans as little as two weeks to pass a federal budget and the tax legislation with their current 52-to-48 majority.

Senate Democrats including Elizabeth Warren, Mass., and Chris Van Hollen, Md., urged McConnell to immediately seat Jones so he can vote on the GOP's tax bill.

"We should be ready to make some noise if McConnell doesn't seat Jones before we vote on tax reform. Alabamians deserve to have their voices fully heard," Van Hollen, the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, tweeted after the race was called.

In the lead-up to the election, Bannon all but adopted Moore as the public face of his insurgent effort to topple the congressional leadership of the Republican Party. Bannon appeared at both of Moore's rallies in the final week, and he deployed the full force of his Breitbart News operation to support the campaign.

It did not work. In the end, Jones won about 50 percent of the vote compared with about 49 percent for Moore, with Jones benefiting from strong African American turnout and a white share of the vote about twice as large as Barack Obama won in 2008. Fifty-six percent of women voted for Jones, according to exit polls, while 58 percent of men voted for Moore. Just under 2 percent of voters in the state wrote in a third candidate.

"Bannon's war on the GOP backfired, ricocheted and hit the president," said Scott Reed, a Republican political strategist at the

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who opposed Moore in the primary.

Exit polls showed a steep drop in support for Trump since his victory in 2016. Just 48 percent of voters approved of the president's job performance, higher than the national average but well below the levels of 2016, when Trump adopted Alabama as one of his favorite locations for large rallies.

It was the second time in two months that the state flouted Trump's endorsement. Republican primary voters also rejected Sen. Luther Strange, the president's choice in the September runoff.

Jones, a former federal prosecutor who made his mark convicting Ku Klux Klan members for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, cast his campaign as an opportunity for the state to turn the page on the divisive politics of its past. He supported protecting entitlements such as Medicare and Medicaid, defended Obamacare and said he broadly supported abortion. A gun owner, he supported strengthening the background-check system.

"At the end of the day, this entire race has been about dignity and respect," Jones said at his victory rally, a raucous celebration in Birmingham. "This campaign has been about the rule of law. This campaign has been about common courtesy and decency and making sure that everyone in this state, regardless of which Zip code you live in, is going to get a fair shake."

Democrats were aided by senior congressional Republicans who dropped their endorsements of Moore after the allegations of misconduct surfaced, including hard-line conservatives such as Sen. Mike Lee, Utah, and Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas. McConnell had promised to open an ethics investigation if Moore won, and Alabama's senior senator, Richard Shelby, a Republican, announced that he could not support Moore.

The outcome could have a major impact on Senate primaries in Arizona and Nevada, where Bannon and conservative activists are pushing insurgent candidates who establishment Republicans also fear will be unelectable statewide. These strategists will now step up their argument that candidate quality matters.

"I'm remembering Missouri and Indiana in 2012 – two can't-lose states where we nominated crap candidates and lost," said Steven J. Law, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, a group affiliated with McConnell that opposed Moore in the primary.

Bannon's allies struck back, blaming McConnell's lack of support for handing the seat to a Democrat. "Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment got what they wanted tonight in Alabama," said Andy Surabian, a former Trump White House political aide who works with Bannon. "They handed this seat over to a liberal Democrat."

Jones was aided by a massive infusion of late fundraising, which allowed his campaign and a supportive outside group to dominate television, radio, direct mail and digital ad spending. Highway 31, a super PAC supporting Jones, spent $4.1 million in the final weeks of the campaign, compared with about $1.3 million from two outside groups backing Moore – most of which came from America First Action, a group that supports Trump's agenda.

The Jones campaign also outraised the Moore campaign by five-to-one in the general election, bringing in more than $10 million in total, as liberal donors around the country grew excited about a possible upset.

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Sullivan reported from Birmingham. Scherer reported from Washington. Weigel reported from Gadsden, Ala. Elise Viebeck, David Fahrenthold, Philip Rucker and Scott Clement in Washington and Larry Bleiberg and Jenna Johnson in Alabama contributed to this report.