Gillespie really will win this

[Attorney General & PPT Dwarven Dragon]

I think Gillespie probably has the same chance of winning as Doug Jones in Alabama.

I wish. That would mean he has a 0% chance.

Moore's recent electoral history suggests he's FAR weaker than Generic R in Alabama. In his race to return to the Supreme Court, he won by the embarrassingly silm margin of 52-48 over the democratic candidate Bob Vance. And yes, party affiliations were listed on the ballot. And that was with presidential-year turnout. If the republican strongholds like Shelby County and Baldwin County don't turn out, while the democratic strongholds like Jefferson and Montgomery counties do, Jones can win. Remember, people said that no matter how big the republican wave of 2014 was, Larry Hogan could never win in Maryland because he couldn't possibly outvote Prince George's County. But on election day, that county effectively took a collective nap and Hogan coasted in. No reason the reverse can't happen with Jones, assuming we are heading for a D wave in '18, as most of Atlas and most of the non-Trumplican Pundits believe.

[Attorney General & PPT Dwarven Dragon]

I think Gillespie probably has the same chance of winning as Doug Jones in Alabama. Yeah, I could see it being a 2-point race or so, but IMO there just aren't enough votes for him to win. VA is beyond gone for Republicans.

I think it's a much harder reach for Jones; I'd give him no more than a 10% chance to win.  Which is still possible, and a lot better than the chance he'd have had against Strange.

Disagree that Strange would have done better than Moore (the guy would have been attacked for being a corrupt Establishment politician/insider with ties to an unpopular Bentley administration). I think it would have been a 3- to 4-point race with Strange that could have gone either way. Kind of like MO in 2016. Now it's probably more like a 5- to 8-point race IMO, but Jones could certainly win.

The RCP average shows Northam leading by more than Moore, and the electorate in both races is going to be very Democratic-friendly. Sure, Jones winning isn't very likely, but neither is a Gillespie victory. And I wouldn't really consider VA more elastic than AL either, tbh.

Except that Jones is a newcomer, and Moore's only just started to build after a few weeks from the runoff. Also Jones has mostly run as a run-of-the-mill base taker kind.

Gillespie has already proven what he can do once for himself [not even counting all the successful operations for others], and that was with sleeping giant Mark Warner.

Also by virtue of being D, the chances of snatching defeat from victory's jaws is much higher.

The D's have no monopoly on this (Akin, Mourdock, etc.)

Monopoly? No. Higher chance? Yes.

For every Mourdock or O'Donnell, you've got ten Braleys or Ossoffs or Bayhs or Grimeses or Nunns or ...you get the point.

You're right on Braley and Grimes, but Ossoff, Bayh, and Nunn had no YUGE gaffe that doomed them like Akin/Mourdock did. Bayh and Nunn lost because the year they ran in was too republican for them to win, and Ossoff lost because the DNC and their allies spent too much money on his campaign.