Hello listeners it is Thursday December 14th 2017 I'm Scott Bland your host and you are

listening to Politico's nerd cast. We are going to kick off this week's episode talking about the political earthquake that happened

in Alabama on Tuesday. Democrat Doug Jones won just about 50% of the vote,

was elected to the Senate.

He's the first Democrat elected to an Alabama Senate seat

since 1992, defeating Republican Roy Moore who of course faced all those

allegations of sexual assault, other sexual misconduct of inappropriate conduct with teenagers over the course of the campaign.

So we're going to talk about what happened there, the big surge in the African American vote,

the big crossover vote in some of Alabama's usually conservative white-collar counties.

And we're going to talk about what it means.

Obviously, the Senate Republican Conference is going to be down to 51 votes after Jones is sworn

in, so we're going to talk about what kind of senator he's going to be

and just look forward to the 2018 elections a little bit as well.

We're also going to talk a little bit about 2020.

President Trump getting into a Twitter spat, well attacking actually

on Twitter it wasn't much of a back and forth, attacking Senator Kirsten-Jillerbrand of

New York who is one of the Democrats who appear to be gearing up to run against him in 2020.

We'll talk about what happened there and just some of the dynamics going on within

the Democratic Party right now looking ahead to facing Trump in 2020 and the Trump White House looking at them preparing for him.

And we are also going to talk tax reform once again this week.

Senate and House Republicans have reached a tentative agreement on what's going

to be in the final bill which could pass as soon as next week.

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