Birmingham, Alabama
You’ll find no identity crisis here, Senate candidate Doug Jones keeps saying of his state. “Don’t let anyone tell you this is an election of choices of what Alabama wants to be. It is not that,” he told supporters and campaign volunteers on Sunday. “We know who we are, Alabama. We know who we are. This is an election to tell the world who we are.”
It would be a resonant message were the state about to reject Jones’s opponent, Roy Moore, overwhelmingly. The Republican and former state judge, removed from the bench twice in his career, is not only a political adversary to Jones, Jones’s voters, and even some conservatives, but also a pariah. To these Alabamians, allegations of Moore’s past sexual misconduct have drained him of dignity. They find him unfit for office, yes. But because he’s contemptible.
“The state of Alabama deserves better,” said Sen. Richard Shelby—the state’s most prominent Republican—of Moore. The two men soon could be counterparts in the upper chamber, but Moore will have to get there without the help of Shelby, who told CNN that he wrote in a Republican other than Moore on his ballot.
Shelby’s abandonment amounts to symbolism. However much Jones frames it to the contrary, Moore will not be roundly defeated in Alabama’s special election on Tuesday. Rather, a combination of recent surveys and the state’s socially conservative preferences indicate the Republican is still the favorite. If he loses—which he may, of course, given the unpredictability of special elections and Moore’s radioactivity—it does not figure to be by a significant margin.
No matter what, Moore’s voters do not comprise an insignificant number of Alabamians, even if Jones and his surrogates insist otherwise. Aside from Moore’s slight lead (48 percent to 46 percent support in the Real Clear Politics average of polls), he has a noticeable base independent of typical partisanship, which both Democrats and Republicans in the state admit. “I think Roy Moore has his own following regardless of whether the president’s involved or others,” Shelby said on Sunday.
It’s a following that dates back almost two decades. Moore was comfortably elected chief justice of the Alabama state Supreme Court in 2000. Despite being removed three years later for his refusal to take down a prominent display of the Ten Commandments in a court building, he was elected to the same post again in 2012, this time with a narrow 51.8 percent majority in the general election. He resigned the office this year to run for the Senate—after being suspended last year for instructing probate judges not to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
“I know I’m a conservative voter, and most people in Alabama are conservative voters, and we take kind of pride in Judge Moore’s stance on the bench, and when he kind of bucks the system, and stands up for his beliefs. And I don’t feel like that is a character defect,” said a voter named John in Athens, in the northern part of the state. “I feel like that is something that lacks in a lot of politicians, is when they have the opportunity to stand up for their actual beliefs, they don’t. But Judge Roy Moore does.”
Jones says this sort of voter isn’t representative of much of Alabama: “Our campaign has been about everyone in the state. It’s not been like the Moore campaign—only about a small segment of the population of the state of Alabama,” he told a group of reporters inside a Birmingham diner on Monday morning.
Sen. Cory Booker, who campaigned for Jones here during the weekend, sympathized with the state’s Democrats, saying he’s felt ostracized before, too, because of stereotypes of his fellow New Jerseyians.
“Don’t let anyone talk about Alabama, talk down to Alabama. Please, I’m from Jersey. I definitely don’t want some people just singling out a few folks on the Jersey Shore TV show and thinking that’s my entire state,” he said. “No, there is goodness and decency and mercy and love here.”
Moore highlights other traits he says define the state’s voters, as he told the news program The Voice of Alabama Politics on Sunday.
“I represent their values. I represent what they believe. Alabamians, like many people in the South, are very conservative. They want judges that go by the law. They want immigration to be under the [congressional] purview of what the law is, and what they’ve passed,” he said. “They don’t want courts making it up as they go. They don’t want presidents imposing on them, for example, Common Core. Most of the people of Alabama don’t like Common Core. I don’t like Common Core. But above that, I don’t like the federal government’s involvement in the education system for a state. I think it’s wrong, I think it’s a violation of the Tenth Amendment, it’s a violation of the Article 1, Section 8 [constitutional] powers of Congress, yet we do that both in Republican and Democratic administrations.”
Moore just now has come under attack for a 2011 video in which he expresses more controversial—if not iniquitous—views about the Constitution: namely, his argument that eliminating all amendments after the 10th Amendment “would eliminate many problems” with what he sees as a distortion of the Founding Fathers’ intent for the federal and state governments. The statement reaffirms his critics’ beliefs that he is outside the mainstream of legal and political thought.
But time and again, Moore has found himself comfortably inside the bounds of political viability, which doesn’t appear likely to change come Tuesday night.
