Senate race tests Alabama
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For many Alabama voters, unaccustomed to a competitive election and the national attention that has come with it, the bitter showdown between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones has become something more personal than a race to fill an open Senate seat. It is now a referendum on the state’s identity.
Supporters of Jones say with concern that a win Tuesday by the firebrand Moore would derail the state’s efforts to escape its painful history and rebrand as a forward-thinking place welcoming to Fortune 500 companies and a highly educated workforce. And they express a nagging feeling that a Moore victory would be a deflating sign that Alabama remains beholden to its past.
“You travel across the country and you say ‘Alabama,’ and something goes right across people’s eyes every time,” said retired actor Jonathan Fuller, a 61-year-old Democrat, as he shopped at the Piggly Wiggly supermarket in the suburbs south of Birmingham. “I don’t want to apologize anymore for where I’m from because there is this pocket of stubbornness in my state.”
Supporters of Moore, meanwhile, see his candidacy as a conduit for their rejection of the national media and political elites who they believe unfairly caricature their home state as a cultural backwater. They shrug off the notion that sexual misconduct allegations against Moore — allegations that some see as a fabrication by outsiders — should make a difference.
“I don’t believe a word they say about him,” J.W. Poore, a 77-yearold retired home builder and Republican, said outside a Lowe’s Home Improvement store in the Birmingham area. “The Democrats have been against us all the way. They don’t accept the president, they don’t accept nobody.” He said people outside of Alabama “have no right to judge us.”
The vivid contrast between the two candidates — Moore, 70, with his apocalyptic warnings about Muslims and gay rights, against Jones, a low-key 63-year-old lawyer best known as for prosecuting Ku Klux Klan members who planned the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham — has put in sharp relief the idea that the results could speak volumes about Alabama to the rest of the country — and to itself.
One pivotal group on Tuesday will be voters who feel caught between these two visions and must pick a side, especially Republican-leaning voters who feel pulled between their traditional values and a desire to turn the page on the uglier parts of Alabama’s past.
In the past several decades, Alabama has successfully begun to transform from a largely agricultural economy based around poultry and timber to a manufacturing and technology hub anchored in a growing federal contracting community. Much of the aerospace industry is based around Huntsville. Mercedes-Benz and a core supplier of the company recently relocated to rural Bibb County, and GE Aviation recently announced a $200 million investment to build a new ceramic matrix composites factory.
The local universities have invested considerably in recent years in science and engineering programs, nurturing a booming biotechnology industry.
From the shadow of the University of Alabama’s football stadium to Moore’s hilly hometown of Gadsden, voters — black and white, Democrat and Republican — said they are deliberating in their communities and sometimes with themselves on the campaign and what it means for their state.
“We’ve got a lot of good here, a lot of people who died for equal rights. And we’ve got a lot of people who are stuck in 1930, and that’s not going to change,” Phillip Hutchins, a 67-year-old Democrat and retired aircraft worker, said last week outside a grocery store in Titusville, a heavily black neighborhood in Birmingham.
While Trump has endorsed Moore, as has former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon, Strange and veteran Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., have remained wary of the former judge who was twice removed from the state Supreme Court — and have called the allegations against him credible and disturbing.