...in the Alabama exit polls that should petrify Republicans, a few fairly jump out. A good deal of attention has been paid, and rightly so, to the level of African American turnout, which, at between 28 and 29 percent of the overall electorate, actually exceeded black turnout in 2012, when President Obama was on the ballot. If a comparable level of turnout can be approximated next year in Pennsylvania, Democratic Governor Tom Wolf's chances of re-election would rise significantly. And if Latino turnout follows the upward trajectory of minority participation we've seen in Alabama and Virginia, that would bode well for Democratic Senate pickups in Arizona and Nevada (which would enable Democrats to retake the Senate), and—who knows?—maybe even Texas, where Congressman Beto O'Rourke, who should have a lock on the Irish-Latino vote, is challenging Ted Cruz.
But the exit poll numbers that pose the real long-term peril to the GOP are those of the young. Among voters under 45, Doug Jones cleaned Roy Moore's clock, winning 61 percent of young Alabamians. Cross-tabs from the election exit poll show that Jones got the vote of 41 percent of whites under the age of 30, and 28 percent of the vote of whites 30 and over.
In Ernst Lubitsch's wonderful 1939 comedy Ninotchka, Greta Garbo, playing a Soviet commissar delivering a short report on the latest purge trials, announces, “There will be fewer but better Russians!” The Trump-Bannon plan for the Republican Party seems to be to ensure there will be fewer and steadily more repulsive Republicans. The flight of millennials from Republican ranks has now extended to Alabama whites (who should be the party’s staunchest redoubt). A Monmouth national poll released Wednesday afternoon showed Trump’s approval rating among women down to a mere 24 percent, while his disapproval had soared to 68 percent—numbers at once completely understandable and utterly breathtaking. The GOP looks to be winnowing down to a party of old white men who don’t much like anybody else.
Finally, a word on Alabama. At the end of World War II, when the Pentagon pondered where to put Werner Von Braun and his German rocketeers, it decided that if there was anyplace in these United States that wouldn't be upset by a sudden influx of actual Nazi scientists, it would be Alabama. Seventy years later, the state is still backward and benighted, but as Doug Jones said in his victory speech, it cast a vote for decency on Tuesday. It may take a while, but let's hope it's the first of many.