Roy Moore did something normally so impossible it would be considered downright miraculous if it weren’t so odious. By running such a terrible campaign and by having such an awful past, Moore helped Alabama adopt New York values. More specifically, he pushed them to elect Doug Jones, the only pro-abortion senator from the Deep South.
This feat shouldn’t be underestimated. While only 14 percent of Alabama agrees with Jones on abortion, 49.92 percent of the electorate went ahead and pulled the lever for the Democrat anyway. Barely a year after delivering a southern avalanche of support for Donald Trump, they knowingly voted for a Senate candidate no less extreme than Hillary Clinton.
Does Jones back Roe v. Wade? Check. Want federal dollars for Planned Parenthood? Check. Support for abortion on demand and oppose a 20-week abortion ban? Check and check.
Pushed on that last point by Chuck Todd during a September interview on NBC, Jones didn’t relent. Asked, in not so many words, whether it was acceptable to abort a baby capable of life outside the womb, the little southerner said he wasn’t “in favor of anything that is going to infringe on a woman’s right and her freedom to choose.” It was, he explained, a long-held view, “a position I continue to have.”
This extremism proved a political liability in Alabama where, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center Study, 58 percent of adults believe that abortion should be “illegal in all or most cases.” And for a while Jones tried hedging a bit, but ultimately he opposed any restriction or regulation on abortion.
After credible, substantiated, and corroborated allegations surfaced that Moore had a thing for teenagers, the race narrowed. Moore went on the defensive. Jones went on the offensive. And Alabama, as the New Yorker observed, was forced to decide between “the morality of sexual predation and the morality of abortion.”
Many voters likely made their decision on pragmatic grounds, no doubt reasoning that Jones couldn’t do much to push pro-abortion reforms. Assuming there isn’t another Supreme Court nomination or big-ticket legislation before 2018 when the Senate shakes up next, they’re probably right.
But the simple fact remains that Moore, the aspiring one-man vice squad, made social conservatives vote against their conscience. In short, he broke the Bible Belt.
