Why Jones won: Moore missed Trump’s standard in every Alabama county

Democrat Doug Jones pulled off a nail-biting win in Alabama’s Senate special election, skating by with 50 percent of the vote to Roy Moore’s 48. That represents a monumental victory for the Democrats in a deep-red state where Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump by 28 points.

Jones’s win comes thanks to a significant, nearly uniform surge of Democratic votes statewide. But he also owes the victory in large part to Moore’s unpopularity — the Republican seriously underperformed in statewide elections even before he faced accusations of sexual assault and misconduct against teenage girls.

Moore underperformed Trump’s results by 14 percentage points in the north and central region, by nine points in the Black Belt and by 11 points in southern Alabama.

Typically reliable and sizable Republican wins in the rural north and south of the state evaporated into razor thin margins. Between that and an increased margin in the Black Belt, Jones was able to eke out a 21,000-vote victory, while Republicans normally win by more than half a million votes.

These swings can be seen in counties majority white and black, Republican and Democrat. And that means it couldn’t have just been a surge in African American turnout, or just rural Trump voters staying home, or just Republicans crossing over to vote for Jones. Jones’s campaign was able to achieve a combination of the three that drove him to victory. Despite it being an off-year special election in December, Jones got 92 percent of Clinton’s vote total. Moore just got 49 percent of Trump’s.

One area that did stand apart from this near-uniform swing leftward — that separated Moore’s defeat from his previous victories — was Alabama’s urban and suburban areas. Though Moore experienced less than a four-point drop statewide, earning 52 percent of the vote in 2012 and 48 percent this election, he lost twice that in Jefferson County, home to Birmingham. And in the city’s surrounding Shelby and Tuscaloosa counties, he lost seven points apiece. In Madison County, home to Huntsville, he saw an eight-point drop, and in Lee County, home to Auburn, he lost 13 points.

Despite all these swings, the big margins were still built with the old Democratic playbook: win big in urban areas such as Birmingham and Montgomery to make up for significant losses in the rural outskirts.

And these margins, when taken together, were just enough to deliver a historic Democratic victory, a rejection of President Trump’s controversial endorsement, and a 51-49 Republican majority in the Senate.