2018 Senate

Prior to the Alabama special Senate election on Tuesday night, there was an ongoing discussion in the media about whether the Republicans would lose either way in Alabama. But as bad as it would have been for Republicans to have had Roy Moore (R) in their Senate caucus, losing this seat is, in our view, significantly worse. The victory by Sen.-elect Doug Jones (D) will cut the GOP’s Senate majority to a slim 51-49 margin, and it opens the door to an unlikely Democratic Senate takeover next year. Perhaps more alarmingly for Republicans, the race reinforced several trends we’ve seen in other places this year. Here was another special election where a Democratic candidate ran very heavily ahead of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 showing. Republican turnout was OK, just like in the Virginia gubernatorial race, but Democratic turnout was a lot better, both in urban and suburban parts of Alabama and also in the Black Belt — a rural, heavily African-American part of the state that gets its name from the color of the soil (turnout was exceptionally high throughout this region). There are obviously a lot of compounding, negative factors for Republicans that led to this result, many having to

This coming Tuesday, Alabamians will go to the polls to decide their next U.S. senator in a rare December special election. While the Yellowhammer State is heavily Republican — President Donald Trump carried it by 28 percentage points in 2016 — the Senate contest is a Toss-up. The candidacy of the Republican nominee, former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, became toxic in early November following reports that he had previously sexually harassed and romantically pursued underage girls. These credible allegations, supplemented by further evidence this past Monday from a woman who was in a relationship with Moore when she was 17 years old, have given former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones (D) a real chance to win in conservative Alabama. The polls indicate that Moore holds a slight lead, one within a reasonable survey error range. The RealClearPolitics average finds the Republican ahead by 2.3 points, while an average of the last eight polls (some of which RCP did not include) shows Moore up 2.5. The point is, it seems close. Moreover, pollsters’ collective lack of experience in surveying typically-uncompetitive Alabama and the odd timing for the election — just two weeks before Christmas — may be making it

In the aftermath of the 2016 election, one couldn’t be blamed for looking beyond polls for indicators about who might be favored in difficult-to-predict elections. That’s not necessarily to supplant polling, which we still see as the best way to measure an electorate and its intentions, but rather to augment it. Additional sources may be particularly helpful when the polls are contradictory or when the likely electorate is hard to model, as may be the case in the Alabama special election between former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore (R) and former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones (D). It’s in that spirit that we wanted to introduce Crystal Ball readers to an interesting new entrant into the field of political prognostication: Cognovi Labs. Cognovi made an against the grain, early prediction in the Alabama Senate race way back on Oct. 22, when most expected that the controversial Roy Moore was still a big favorite to win (and weeks before the sexual assault allegations that rocked his campaign): We’ll get into why Cognovi made that prediction, and how the firm sees the race now, but first a little background: The Ohio-based company uses artificial intelligence and behavior modeling to try to

With less than two weeks to go until the Alabama Senate runoff, we’re pulling back our Leans Democratic rating in the race and going to Toss-up. We just don’t feel comfortable making anyone a favorite at this point. The race is as stern a test of tribal partisanship as one will find, with very Republican Alabama choosing between something of a generic Democrat, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, and a toxic Republican, former state Chief Justice Roy Moore, who was already a weak candidate due to his disregard for the law while on the Alabama Supreme Court before he was rocked by highly credible allegations that he aggressively pursued and sexually assaulted underage girls. Ultimately, it seems quite possible that socially conservative Alabama voters, like Republicans across the country last year when dealing with Donald Trump, will swallow hard and support a very flawed person who will nonetheless vote the way they want over a Democrat who is, importantly, pro-choice on abortion. The more we think about it, the more we’re inclined to think that in a deep red state like Alabama, partisanship may be too much for Jones to overcome. It’s still possible, too, that Moore will finish weakly.

Editor’s note: The Crystal Ball will not be publishing next week. We wish our readers a Happy Thanksgiving. It’s amazing to write, and there’s time for our outlook to change, but here goes: A Democrat is now a narrow favorite to win a Senate special election in Alabama. We’re changing our rating of the Dec. 12 special election from Likely Republican all the way to Leans Democratic. Republicans already were deeply worried about former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s (R) Senate candidacy even before he defeated appointed Sen. Luther Strange (R) in a runoff. Still, even a below-average GOP Senate candidate should still be able to hold Alabama, one of the hardest states for a Democrat to win statewide in the Union: By percentage, the Yellowhammer State was President Donald Trump’s sixth-best state in the 2016 presidential election, and it hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992 (and that Democrat, Sen. Richard Shelby, switched parties in 1994 to become a Republican). And yet, Moore’s candidacy has gone from troubled to radioactive as he has been rocked by very credible allegations of sexual improprieties with teenage girls several decades ago. The story is even more damaging to

The U.S. Senate is a curious, unique legislative body for a lot of reasons. It has arcane rules, such as the filibuster, which limits the passage of most legislative items unless 60 members vote yes. Representation in the Senate is not based on population; instead, each state gets two and only two senators, meaning that California (the most populous state) and Wyoming (the least populous) have equal say in the Senate. Each get 2% of the Senate’s membership — two out of 100 senators — even though California has 12% of the nation’s people while Wyoming only has 0.2%. And unlike the House, where the entire membership is on the ballot every two years, only a third of the Senate’s membership is on the ballot each federal election cycle. A telling sign of the Democratic Party’s challenge in the next Senate election is that slightly more than half of the party’s current caucus, 25 of the 48 members,[1] are on the ballot next year. So even though only a third of the nation’s 100 Senate seats are regularly scheduled for election every two years, a majority of the entire Democratic caucus has to run next year. Meanwhile, just eight of

The dominant theme in next year’s Senate elections is the confluence of two competing forces: The huge number of seats the Democrats are defending versus the usual boost that the non-presidential party, in this case the Democrats, enjoys in midterm elections. On one hand, Democrats are defending 25 of 33 seats, the most overextended any party has been in a midterm since 1970. On the other hand, the president’s party typically loses ground in the Senate in midterms: The average loss is about four seats per election in the 26 midterms since 1914, the first year Senate popular elections were instituted nationally. The reelection rate for non-presidential party Senate incumbents in midterm general elections is also significantly stronger than presidential party incumbents, as we noted in our last Senate ratings update: it’s 91% for the non-presidential party incumbents versus just 75% for the presidential party ones. Still, non-presidential party incumbents do sometimes lose in midterms, and several seem vulnerable in this election: We rate two Democratic incumbents, Sens. Joe Donnelly (D-IN) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO), as Toss-ups, and six others are in the vulnerable Leans Democratic category. It would be a surprise if Democrats saved all of their incumbents this

In the midst of a grueling campaign for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate, Alabama’s political sweet tea has acquired a distinctly sour taste. Appointed incumbent Sen. Luther Strange (R) finds himself in a vulnerable position against former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore (R) in the party’s primary runoff election, which will take place on Tuesday (Sept. 26). Running as an outsider, Moore hopes to once again rebuke the political establishment by upending Strange, the preferred choice of GOP leaders in the nation’s capital. The two candidates arrived at this point by finishing in the top two spots in the Aug. 15 primary. But Alabama, like some other southern states, requires a primary runoff election between the first and second-place primary finishers if no candidate wins a majority of the initial vote. Moore finished first in the primary with 39% while Strange trailed him with 33%. The runoff victor will face former U.S. attorney Doug Jones (D) in the Dec. 12 special general election, which was precipitated by President Donald Trump’s appointment of then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R) as Attorney General of the United States. Not for the first time, an Alabama special Senate election has grabbed the public’s