QUESTION ASKED: Can Democrats Take Back the House in 2018?

Mr. Moore was a seriously flawed candidate, controversial enough to have been tossed off his own state’s Supreme Court twice, and more recently accused of having made improper sexual advances on teenage girls. (He denies the allegations.) Thus, much of the loss to Mr. Jones will be laid at the candidate’s feet. Still, the loss is a huge blow to Mr. Trump personally. He now has backed three straight candidates for statewide office who have lost. And the implications are enormous. “The challenges the GOP faced remain and the finger pointing will only increase,” said Douglas Heye, a longtime top Republican congressional aide. “We remain bitterly divided.”

For Democrats, the victory in a state they never dreamed of winning just a few months ago delivers a jolt of energy—and, perhaps as important, could encourage balky donors who have left the party’s national machinery seriously underfunded this year. Perhaps most encouraging for Democrats, the same coalition of voters that propelled the party to victory in Virginia last month also emerged in Alabama.

I’ve been arguing for a while now that the Republicans need to legislate as though there’s no tomorrow, and if they had, maybe things would have turned out differently in Alabama.