Alabama race turns into nail-biter on eve of vote
MIDLAND CITY, Ala. — Roy Moore rallied rural conservatives, and Doug Jones made his closing argument to a diverse crowd in Birmingham as Alabama’s most unpredictable, volatile and off-the-rails Senate race in memory shuddered to a close before Tuesday’s special election.
“It’s difficult to drain the swamp when you’re up to your neck in alligators, and that’s where we are,” Moore, who has been accused of sexual misconduct against teenage girls, said Monday night at an event in Alabama’s Wiregrass region, near the Florida border. “We’re up to our neck in alligators. We’re up to the neck in people that don’t want change in Washington, D.C.”
Along with the theatrics of the last day, the state, by turns energized and exhausted, faced a barrage of television ads, conflicting polls, presidential tweets and last-minute pleas.
But on the eve of the vote, with huge implications for both parties and for President Donald Trump, the blur of campaign tactics did little to clarify the contest’s trajectory.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill said he expected a modest turnout of 20 to 25 percent — it was about 64 percent in the 2016 presidential election. Local
officials have reported an unusually high number of requests for absentee ballots, but Democratic and Republican strategists said it was exceptionally difficult to predict who, exactly, would ultimately cast votes in a rare mid-December special election.
And so with turnout the biggest riddle, both Jones and Moore scrambled Monday to shore up support where they could. After dark, Moore rallied supporters in this rural area of southeast Alabama, a near-certain trove of Republican votes. Jones, who spent his weekend appearing with prominent black Democrats, campaigned in Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama’s two most populous cities, to try to energize urban and African-American voters who would be central to a Democratic victory.
Balancing his message
Jones, a former U.S. attorney who also needs support from independent and Republican voters if he is to win Tuesday, tried to balance his get-out-thevote appeals to Democrats with outreach to people who ordinarily would not consider voting for a Democrat. Indeed, it seemed his most powerful weapon was a Republican: Sen. Richard Shelby, the dean of the state’s congressional delegation, who, in an interview on CNN on Sunday, denounced Moore and declared that Alabama “deserves better.”
“The people of the state, they have elected Richard Shelby for four decades,” Jones said of the senator, who has said he wrote in “a distinguished Republican” rather than vote for Moore. “They’re going to listen to Richard Shelby.”
Jones also earned an implicit boost, of a sort, from Condoleezza Rice, the Republican former secretary of state and an Alabama native. In a statement issued by her office Monday afternoon, Rice called on Alabamians to “reject bigotry, sexism and intolerance” and “insist that our representatives are dignified, decent and respectful of the values we hold dear.”
While Rice did not mention either candidate by name, and it is unclear how widely her statement will be seen before Election Day, she joined Shelby in giving a permission slip to wavering Republicans who may be tempted to vote for someone other than a nominee they find intolerable. Some Republicans, echoing Shelby, have written in other figures, and a liberal super PAC, hoping to starve Moore of Republican voters who are skeptical of both candidates, has urged write-in votes for Nick Saban, the University of Alabama’s head football coach.
That Jones is even in a position to benefit from a make-or-break turnout effort is extraordinary by the standards of Alabama, where no Democrat has won an election for Senate or governor in almost 20 years and the party’s statewide infrastructure has crumbled and all but collapsed.
Conflicting polls
A Fox News poll published Monday found Jones with a 10-point lead over Moore, but other recent surveys have found Moore ahead, and private Democratic polling shows a closer race than the Fox poll suggested.
The campaign’s basic mathematics are widely agreed upon: If Jones can attract the votes of young people and AfricanAmericans, and peel away a chunk of Republicanleaning whites — particularly women — who recoil from Moore, then he has a chance to win. Otherwise, the state’s conservative DNA is all but certain to kick in and rescue Moore from tribulations of his own making.
Moore, who has denied allegations of sexual misconduct, has been a surprisingly rare sight in public as the campaign nears its end. But he re-emerged at a chandelier-adorned, barnlike building here Monday night in his first public appearance since last Tuesday. The event in Dale County was safe political ground for Moore, who won 66 percent of the county’s vote in his last statewide general election.
At a rally that featured three conservative firebrands — Stephen Bannon, former White House adviser; David Clarke, former sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin; and Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas — Moore’s supporters urged voters to show up Tuesday.
“This comes down simply to who is going to work the hardest,” Bannon said at the rally, which, at varying points, included the theme music to “Mission Impossible” and boos at the mention of Shelby’s name.
Rural and reliably Republican pockets of east Alabama, like Dale County, could prove to be Moore’s political salvation. Along a stretch of U.S. Route 431 between Phenix City and Dothan on Monday, signs promoting Moore were common. Advertisements for Jones, whose signs fill yards in places like Birmingham and Gadsden, were rare.
Defining Alabama
Jones’ strategy does not depend on carrying rural counties that hug Georgia and Florida. Instead, he is hoping to run up significant leads in Alabama’s urban and suburban areas, drawing on traditional Democratic voters as well as Republicans spooked by the allegations against Moore or a controversial record that predates the Senate campaign.
Speaking briefly at an event space attached to a vintage car showroom in Birmingham, flanked by basketball star Charles Barkley, Jones cast the vote as a choice that would define Alabama’s identity.
“It is time that we put our decency, our state, before political party,” Jones said. Barkley was more blunt: “At some point, we’ve got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.”
Although Jones is running against the tides of recent political history in Alabama, Moore is a deeply divisive figure in the state, where he was, in effect, twice removed as chief justice of the state Supreme Court.
He has a base of supporters whose fervor is the envy of Democrats, as well as plenty of Republicans who have hoped to vanquish him over the years. But should Moore prevail Tuesday, he will likely have Trump, in part, to thank. The president did not visit Alabama after Moore won the Republican nomination in September, but he repeatedly took to Twitter in support of Moore and recorded an automated phone message that went out to Republican voters.