This is an interesting analysis of Roy Moore’s defeat from CNN.

Some of this polling data would seem to bear out what I have been saying for quite some time. For around 15 years, I have been arguing that conventional “right-wing” politics of the kind associated with racism, religious fundamentalism, social conservatism, Chamber of Commerce types, or traditional WASP social norms is slowly being killed off by cultural, demographic, and generational changes. Instead, this older form of “conservatism” is being replaced by a new kind of “conservatism” rooted in newer, high-tech industries and a rising upper middle class that is ostensibly “liberal” or cosmopolitan in its cultural outlook but no less to committed imperialism, statism, and capitalism than its “right-wing” predecessors. Obviously, this rising class of New Elites is already dominant in the Blue Zones. However, the influence of the Blue Tribe continues to expand, even in surprising ways. My own state of Virginia was once one of the reddest of the Red Zones, but has now turned Blue.

No state has been more conventionally Red than Alabama, and yet this polling data indicates a significant Blue turn for Alabama as well. It would be easy to blame Roy Moore’s loss on the fact that he is, well, Roy Moore. However, this data shows that Moore performed poorly with virtually every demographic except middle-aged to elderly, rural, white conservatives. Moore lost spectacularly among young people,  minorities, women, liberals, and moderates. It is doubtful that a candidate with similar politics but who was less personally controversial would have done much better. Maybe such a candidate would have won but only by a margin. Also, the winner, Doug Jones, is hardly a “left-winger” but a standard centrist technocratic type, and former US Attorney. It should be remembered that US Attorneys (federal prosecutors) are central figures in the perpetuation of the domestic American police state. It is precisely these kinds of centrist, neoliberal, technocratic, “authoritarian cosmopolitan” types who are our greatest enemy, not “right-wing extremists.”