Doug Jones didn’t just defeat Roy Moore in Alabama’s Senate race on Tuesday night — he administered the most crushing and embarrassing political blow of President Donald Trump’s young presidency.

Jones’ win meant that Trump, who had endorsed Luther Strange in the Republican primary before backing Moore in the general election, threw his weight behind the losing candidate not once, but twice, in the Alabama race.


It was an extraordinary outcome in a state that Trump carried by 28 points in last year’s presidential election. Jones’ victory, the first by a Democrat in Alabama in 25 years, exposed the limits of the president’s power in a party that is now frequently referred to as “the party of Trump.” Indeed, though rank-and-file Republicans have resisted, fought, and feared Trump’s influence over GOP voters, Tuesday’s election results suggested that, whatever the president’s power, he is incapable of boosting other anti-establishment candidates to office.

In addition to supporting both losing candidates in the Alabama race, Trump also endorsed Ed Gillespie, who lost the Virginia governor's race last month.

Jones' win, said one senior administration official, "is a big black eye for the president."

For the president, who ignored the advice of both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his own political team at the White House to stay out of the race, it was a self-inflicted wound. Though he has at times appeared to be able to whip up the support of Republican voters around an issue on a whim, be it to inveigh against the NFL policy on standing during the national anthem or to direct their fury at the press, Tuesday's results demonstrated that he was incapable of rallying his base around the man who was perhaps his most controversial cause.

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On Wednesday morning, Trump claimed that he was initially correct when he endorsed Strange in the Republican primary, tweeting that the "reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election. I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!"

The president's allies say Moore was a flawed candidate and that Tuesday's results were not a referendum on Trump himself. Indeed, Moore, who faced public accusations of sexual impropriety just weeks before the election, vastly underperformed the average Republican candidate in the state.

Moments after the results were announced, people close to the White House began casting blame on McConnell. In a move sure to deepen tensions between the president and the Senate majority leader, they argued that McConnell's refusal to support Moore — the Senate GOP's campaign arm severed its ties with the candidate in mid-November — had cost him the race.

The president, for his part, tracked the race closely, asking to see poll numbers from his advisers. On Tuesday he followed news coverage that played on mute during his daily meetings. His former chief-strategist Steve Bannon, now the chairman of Breitbart News, was alone among the members of the Trump inner circle pushing him to back Moore. The two spoke Tuesday morning, and Bannon offered Trump assurances that Moore would prevail.

Trump voiced his support for Moore on Tuesday morning, writing on Twitter: “The people of Alabama will do the right thing. Doug Jones is Pro-Abortion, weak on Crime, Military and Illegal Immigration, Bad for Gun Owners and Veterans and against the WALL. Jones is a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet. Roy Moore will always vote with us. VOTE ROY MOORE!”

Trump has already faced legislative setbacks resulting from the division and disarray within the GOP. With the Republican margin in the Senate set to drop now to just a single vote, he will face more difficulty pushing his agenda through Congress — and a keyed-up Democratic opposition which, for the first time, can realistically talk about recapturing the Senate majority.

“Until now, it’s really not mathematically possible for Democrats to compete for the majority in the Senate,” said Jennifer Duffy of the Cook Political Report. “For the first time all cycle, it’s not out of the question.”

A number of factors brought the president back around to Moore in the wake of the bombshell allegations that ultimately derailed his campaign.

Trump was instinctively sympathetic to Moore, but initially followed the advice of his advisers to stay out. Moore’s shaky appearance on Sean Hannity’s radio show the day after the Washington Post published a report airing accusations from four women that, as a thirty-something district attorney, Moore had pursued sexual relationships with them as teenagers, stirred up doubts in the president’s own mind about whether he was guilty.

Also dissuading the president from jumping back into the race was that Moore’s poll numbers were tumbling in the weeks after the initial allegations surfaced, when several more women said that Moore had pursued them as teenagers, too. A Fox News survey conducted during that time showed Moore trailing by eight points, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee had him down 12.

But as the accusations sunk in, Moore began to claw his way back, eventually pulling close enough for Trump to intervene with an endorsement that he could credibly claim pulled him over the finish line.

Factors both personal and political also helped draw the president back into the race. Already inclined to follow his own instincts, Trump was irritated when his daughter, Ivanka, joined the pile on against Moore, saying she had no reason to doubt his accusers and that “there is a special place in hell for people who prey on children.”

He also made the cold political calculation that ceding a Senate seat could endanger Republicans’ hold on the Senate, something that would have been nearly impossible without a victory in Alabama. It’s a scenario that makes the passage of any major legislation — already challenging given the president’s strained relations with congressional Republicans — that much dicier.

McConnell and his team have insisted since Moore’s nomination that, whatever the outcome, Republicans were doomed: Either the Democrats would pick up a seat, or Republicans would be propelled into an Ethics Committee investigation that would have lasted for months, leading potentially to the first expulsion of a sitting senator in modern history.

If Jones’ victory was a psychological blow to the president, it is sure to boost Democratic spirits ahead of next year’s midterm elections, where their odds of recapturing the Senate majority are slim but now not impossible.

Political commentators immediately began comparing Jones’ win in deeply Republican Alabama to Republican Scott Brown’s 2010 victory in Massachusetts, a Democratic stronghold. That year, Brown’s victory in another special Senate election in January foreshadowed the massive Republican victories that would come that November, when the GOP regained control of the House and expanded their conference in the Senate.

Some Republicans aren’t panicking yet, but arguing the race is a warning sign to the party — and to the president — that candidate quality matters.

“It’s bad for the GOP writ large but due to the unique nature of Moore’s problems, it’s unclear if it’s just bad or if we’re looking at a tsunami in 2018,” said Mark Harris, a Republican consultant. “Hopefully this is a wake-up call to Republicans everywhere that we can’t afford to nominate horrible candidates.”

It was unclear, as of Tuesday evening, how Trump was reckoning with the loss, though he kept his trademark invective in reserve in his initial comments on the race.

“Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory,” the president wrote in a tweet. “The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!”

Alex Isenstadt contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the platform of Hannity's interview with Moore. It was on the commentator's radio show, not Fox News.