The Alabama special election for the US Senate finally ended Tuesday night (Dec. 12) with Doug Jones drawing 20,715 votes more than rival candidate Roy Moore. Following the results, both candidates made their speeches, with Doug Jones taking the lead to announce his win with his broadcast, followed by Moore's, where he refused to concede the election to Jones.

Dan Senor who is a Republican analyst and former adviser to US House Speaker Paul Ryan, was on "CBS This Morning" to talk about the Alabama special election results. He has apparently been in touch with congressional Republicans since Roy Moore lost the election.

Sexual assault, pedophilia allegations before election day

Senor said that most of the Republicans, which included the leadership, are relieved that Moore didn't win the election. In recent weeks, the Republican candidate has been accused of sexual harassment and pedophilia, all of the accusations being decades old from the 1970s.

Many Moore supporters also cited the age of the sexual harassment incidents as a way to discredit them, at the beginning of the reported allegations. Despite this, Moore himself denied that they ever happened after initially admitting that he dated younger women back then. Immediately after the reports, Republican leadership publicly expressed that Moore could become a political liability for their party in the US Senate seat.

Refuses to concede against overwhelming odds

During what was supposed to be a concession speech by Moore, the Moore campaign's Bill Armistead initially said that Alabama law requires a recount if the vote is within one-half of a percent. In fact, the distance between Moore and Jones is more than that.

Soon after Moore's two-minute speech, the Secretary of State of Alabama, John Merrill, said that the provisional and overseas ballots could trigger a recount if those ballots narrowed the margin.

Moore would have to submit a waiver to finally concede but when the secretary of state spoke to reporters about the results, Merrill also added that those ballots were unlikely to make any difference.

Regardless, Moore and his supporters are likely to push for a recount anyway, but the Alabama Republican Party also added that they would not support it.

It is in this case that most will support the legitimacy of the election results against Moore and his supporters. Even with these, Roy Moore's campaign showed their resilience against their defeat by pandering to their religious supporters by either crediting God for the result, suggesting it would be under the condition that they would win. Roy Moore did the same when saying that they had been painted in an unfaithful light.
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