Turnout would be the key to which of the wildly conflicting polls would best presage the result of Alabama’s special Senate election, wrote Republican consultant Patrick Ruffini earlier this week.

That proved correct. Statewide, turnout was down 37 percent from Nov. 2016. It was down less, 31 percent, in the five metropolitan counties around Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery, and Mobile, with their black communities and most of the state’s high-education whites.