To the surprise of many, 2017 ended on the polar opposite note 2016 ended on: a stunning election victory where a candidate unfit for office actually lost.
When Doug Jones beat Roy Moore to become Alabama’s first Democratic senator in 25 years, most Americans saw this moment as a sign of unification. Maybe America learned from its mistakes from just a year prior and could carry this momentum towards a sweeping shift in Washington.
Once the demographics were released, though, a more pressing picture was painted. Jones’ election victory was not a shift away from President Donald Trump, it was not a changing tide toward political equality and it was not a sign for a victorious 2018 for Democrats.
Alabama’s senate race simply demonstrated how divided we are as a nation.           
The two candidates could not have represented their parties any better. As we all have probably heard by now, Moore, the Republican nominee, was accused of sexually assaulting eight women when they were teenagers. Going beyond those disgusting allegations, Moore is the poster child for Trump’s Republican Party. 
According to Ben Kamisar at The Hill, Moore has stated in the past he believes terror attacks and violence are caused by godlessness, homosexuality should be illegal, Muslims should not be allowed in Congress and Barack Obama was not born in America.
Somehow, none of the comments and beliefs prevented Moore from not only winning the Republican nomination, but also winning over 48 percent of the vote, according to Newsweek’s Summer Meza. It should come to no surprise Jones dominated the minority vote.
According to Scott Clement and Emily Guskin with The Washington Post, Jones won 96 percent of the African American vote, including 98 percent of black women. While it did not cost Trump the presidential election, the Republican Party has had difficulty appealing to minority voters for decades, and thanks to candidates like Moore, the Republican party cannot hope to win over non-white voters anymore.
While Moore’s bigoted remarks and shocking accusations cost the Republican Party a Senate seat, Jones certainly did not make the election easy for Democrats.
The major stumbling block for Jones in Alabama was he is pro-choice. For many, this made Jones nearly unelectable in Alabama. 
Once again, it should come as no surprise Moore hung on to over 90 percent of the Republican turnout, despite his many flaws.
The election should not be about how Jones won Alabama, but it should instead be about how Moore lost Alabama. 
According to Meza’s Newsweek article, Jones only won 49.9 percent of the vote and won the election by a mere 1.5 percent. To demonstrate how small Jones’s margin of error was: write-in candidates, including people like Nick Saban, won 1.7 percent of the vote.
Jones symbolizes the Democrats’ ineptitude to appeal to non-Democratic voters. Jones won, not by drawing conservatives and moderates towards him, but by encouraging liberals and Democrats to volunteer and vote. The only person Jones could have defeated was Moore.
The saddening reality about the Alabama senate race is the tribalism which dominates American politics and has ruined our elections.
Candidates no longer have to worry about convincing voters to support their campaign; they instead focus on not losing potential voters, and how to increase their party’s voter turnout.
Despite their flaws, both men won lopsided victories in key demographics. The winning difference was voter turnout. If more than 43 percent of conservatives actually voted, it is highly probable Moore would have won.
The fact an alleged pedophile could still win almost 70 percent of the white vote, 83 percent of the conservative vote and 48 percent of the overall vote is truly disturbing.
At this point in time, it seems we are locked into our party by race, gender, education or socioeconomic status long before the out votes are tallied.