For nearly a century, probably beginning with the University of Alabama's 20-19 victory over the University of Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl, Alabamans have greeted each other by saying "Roll Tide." On Tuesday night the phrase, an allusion to the university football team's mysterious Crimson Tide nickname, acquired a new meaning: an unlikely, unforeseen but unyielding tide of rebellion that swept Democrat Doug Jones into the U.S. Senate against a Republican ardently supported by President Donald Trump.
The Jones tide was produced by a stunning coalition: women, young people, black people and Trump opponents. Together they produced the American political upset of the 21st century, spurning Roy Moore, the Republican candidate fighting off accusations of sexual misconduct, some allegedly with teenagers.
That riptide was the result of a perfect political storm: A national uproar over sexual misconduct. Drooping poll soundings for the President. The mobilization of Democrats empowered, ironically, by their lack of power in Washington, where next week a comprehensive tax overhaul likely will be passed without a single syllable of Democratic input. And a resurgence of commitment to politics from black people, an astonishing 96 per cent of whom sided with Mr. Jones.
"This was a striking group of people who came together for Jones," said Lesley J. Gordon, who holds an endowed chair in Southern history at the University of Alabama. "It's been taken for granted for so long that the Republicans would not lose an important race in Alabama. This election showed that many of the assumptions about Alabama may not apply any more."
A similar contest in a different month with a different candidate might well have produced a different result, however. That notion provided balm for Republicans, who have controlled Alabama for decades, so much so that until Tuesday not one Democrat had been elected to statewide office in seven years. And though it produced rejoicing for Democrats, exulting that they had won a Senate race in a state that went Republican the past 10 elections in a row – and that gave Mr. Trump an astonishing margin of victory of nearly two-to-one last year – there was reason for caution as they gird for next year's midterm congressional elections. In this atmosphere, the Republicans are unlikely to field another candidate anywhere with the personal disadvantages Mr. Moore took to the Alabama contest.
"It would be a terrible mistake to think, after winning this race and winning gubernatorial races last month in Virginia and New Jersey, that we Democrats have figured things out," said Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. "We still have a need for a new generation of leaders. We need to have an economic plan, a national-security strategy, and we can't just get there simply by opposing Trump. We can't start winning again unless we have something to say ourselves."
Though Mr. Moore has said he will ask for a recount, Mr. Trump's message of congratulations to the Democrat was an indication that Republicans have little hopes that their candidate will prevail and now acknowledge that their margin in the Senate will shrink either later this month or, more likely, early in the new year.
With 51 votes in the 100-member chamber after Mr. Jones is certified and seated, the Republicans thus would be able to lose only one vote from their caucus to prevail on fractious measures that divide the Senate by party. (With a 50-50 tie, Vice-President Mike Pence is entitled to vote, thus tipping the body toward the Republicans.)
That could have enormous significance in legislation bearing on controversial issues such as health care or in fractious confirmation battles should a Supreme Court seat become vacant. Three of the nine members of the high court are 79 years old or older.
The current debate over taxes will not be affected. The election certification process in Alabama is lengthy, and the lawmakers who this week are working to reconcile the separate, and different, House and Senate versions of the legislation are approaching the end of their work. Until Mr. Jones is sworn in, the seat he will occupy will be held by Luther Strange, the Republican who was appointed in February to fill the vacancy created when the incumbent, Jeff Sessions, was confirmed as Mr. Trump's Attorney-General.
Mr. Strange had hoped to win the seat in his own right, and his failure to prevail in a bitter primary is part of the Alabama fallout – which included a Wednesday-morning tweet from Mr. Trump that said: "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!"
Mr. Moore was the primary candidate supported by former White House aide Steve Bannon, the activist heralded by racist and white-supremacist elements in American society who saw the former judge as part of the advance guard of a revolution in the Republican Party. Mr. Moore's defeat was greeted with quiet relief by many mainstream Republican figures, who were repelled by the notion of an alleged sex offender in the Senate and who abhor the rhetoric and tactics of Mr. Bannon.
Even so, Tuesday's election was an important political marker in a state that has resisted reform of any sort for decades. The Depression-era Federal Writers' Project that produced guides to each of the states noted in 1941 that one temperance-oriented Alabama wife created a whiskey-bottle tombstone for her boozy husband (with a stone cork at the foot of the grave). For more than a decade beginning in 1920, Alabama was represented in the Senate by James T. Heflin, who once threw a black man out of a streetcar and then fired shots through the window, and who ended his Capitol Hill career with a five-hour racist screed on the Senate floor. Governor George C. Wallace was probably the most famous segregationist in the civil-rights era, backing away from blocking the entry of Vivian Malone and James Hood into the University of Alabama only after President John F. Kennedy took over the Alabama National Guard to force the desegregation of the institution.
The spectacle surrounding Mr. Moore was only the latest episode in a struggle over the culture and politics of Alabama, which because its city of Montgomery was the site of the first capital of the Confederacy, has enormous symbolic power.
That was perhaps the principal reason Democrats invested such significance in the Jones victory Tuesday night. "The Republicans doubled down on a [candidate] who believed that women shouldn't vote and that being gay should be illegal," said Mr. Moulton, the two-term congressman from Boston's North Shore. "Here people put principle over politics, including a lot of Republicans who moved across the aisle to do the right thing for the country."