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The Omen of Alabama

Voters waiting in line to vote in Alabama on Tuesday.Credit...Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The political winds are shifting with all the subtlety of a hurricane.

Doug Jones’s defeat of Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election is yet the latest signal that the accommodators of Donald Trump, those who have normalized and bolstered him, the gutless, schismatic conservatives who abandoned principle to follow a pariah, will have hell to pay in 2018.

Yes, Roy Moore was defeated, but it can never be fully erased from history or memory that he was endorsed by this president and supported by the Republican National Committee. All of Roy Moore’s sins are their sins, and they will wear that scarlet R straight into the midterms.

We should also note that Jones didn’t win by a landslide. The margin was thin as a rail. Moore still won the Republican vote and the white vote and, yes, the “white born-again Christian” vote. These people contorted their faith to support a man accused of unthinkable transgressions.

They made a mockery of Christian faith and moral fidelity. But as the Apostle Paul wrote in Galatians, “God is not mocked.”

The Resistance is marching on, emboldened, with a strategy and proof that the strategy can work.

The Alabama election has demonstrated once again that resisters aren’t just angry; they are motivated and insistent that the past will not defeat the future.

It demonstrated once again that black voters, particularly black women, have been summoned to save America from its worst impulses and to establish that they are the most loyal and crucial constituency of a Democratic Party that still doesn’t grant them enough respect or deference, instead often pleading in the final hours after efforts to win more white voters fall short.

The election demonstrated that for many college-educated, suburban conservatives, there is a limit to their tolerance for regression, fallaciousness, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia and anti-scientific, ahistoric, truth-hostile positioning.

It demonstrated that the South is not necessarily solid. The Resistance has its own Southern Strategy.

And most important, it proved that people who believe in the fundamental values of this country, in its ability to change, in the necessity of making the imperfect more perfect, are not the minority, but rather an inflamed majority.

It proved that Trump was a fringe candidate who tapped into an American ugliness and rode it to a fluke victory with the help of a foreign adversary.

Trump is both anomaly and abomination, and America wants to carve him out like a cancer. Trump’s approval rating is at record lows, and sinking.

Also, the unresolved accusations of sexual misconduct and assault against the president have resurfaced, and, as Politico reported Tuesday:

“Fifty percent of registered voters think the allegations against Trump are credible, more than the 29 percent who think they are not credible. The remaining 21 percent of voters don’t know if the allegations are credible.”

The president this week continued his crusade of cruelties against women and minorities, this time targeting Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York by essentially calling her a whore in a tweet:

“Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office ‘begging’ for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!”

And of course, the pathological lying continues unabated.

The Resistance knows that Trump is utterly unfit to be president of the United States, and now he is weak and hemorrhaging. The wretch has been wounded.

The Resistance has come to take its country back and make America great again. That means posing a plausible electoral threat to all things Trump and every person who supported his defilement of this country.

The Alabama win was just the wind the Resistance needed beneath its wings to feel the true expanse of the possible.

Confidence is a compounding commodity. It builds on itself.

The Resistance is rising to meet the profound threat that Trumpism poses, and the Resistance is beating it back into the swamp from which it crawled.

Republicans must brace for the reckoning. If the Resistance can maintain its intensity — and there is no sign of it weakening — the midterms may well amount to a purge.

I invite you to join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter (@CharlesMBlow), or email me at chblow@nytimes.com.

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