AL-Sen Postmortem

Crazy things happen in special elections.  In 2008, amidst the backdrop of a corrupt convicted incumbent, the 2nd Congressional district of Louisiana, centered by the massively blue city of New Orleans, narrowly voted for Republican Joseph Cao in a low-turnout affair.  In January 2010, a perfect storm of events led to Republican Scott Brown winning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts.  And now, December 12, 2017, will go down in the history books for a special election result in the same league if not a little bit crazier than the previous two.....a 21,000-vote victory by Democrat Doug Jones in a Senate race in Alabama.

In the last decade, Alabama has become the hardest state in the country for a Democrat to win, with white Republicans on the majority side of a nearly symmetrical partisan polarization along racial lines.  Fewer than 15% of whites statewide voted for either Obama or Hillary Clinton in the last three Presidential elections, and whites make up 68% of the state's population.  The math had simply become impossible.  So even as the early dominoes began to fall with Democrats getting a solid candidate to fill Jeff Sessions' Senate seat in U.S. Attorney Doug Jones....and with Republicans nominating incredibly controversial twice-impeached judge Roy Moore as their party's candidate....and with a credible child molestation story befalling Moore four weeks before the election, a lot more dominoes still had to fall for Doug Jones to win.

The pre-2008 path to victory for a Democrat in Alabama didn't exist anymore.  Conservative whites in the rural northern portion of the state had realigned hopelessly Republican, meaning Democrats had to carve out a new path to victory that included thousands of upscale suburban conservatives who had never voted Democrat before in their lives and never figured the day would come when they would.   But even if that happened, it wouldn't be enough.  Turnout among rural whites would need to be soft and turnout among African Americans would have to be spectacularly robust.

All of those things happened on Tuesday night.  In 2008, when Obama first ran, African Americans made up 28% of the electorate, punching slightly above their weight statewide.  On Tuesday night, blacks made up 30% of the electorate.  The old conventional wisdom was that a Democrat needed about 34% of the white vote to win Alabama, more than double what they've been getting in recent cycles.  But final exit polls suggested Doug Jones only got 30% of white voters, falling short of the target.  Just about all of the time, that wouldn't be enough for a Democrat to win, but with blacks making up 30% of the electorate, it was just enough.  And unlike 2002, when it last looked like a Democrat had won in Alabama, the result was wide enough that a fishy-smelling discovering of 6,000 new votes from a Republican stronghold county the day after the election wasn't enough to flip the result.

The term "perfect storm" is overused in today's political vernacular, but the Alabama result lived up to it.  The early results were heavily weighted towards Republican voters, giving a mirage of an insurmountable Moore lead even with well over half of the vote in, but Jones' vote from more heavily populated counties were counted late, and it became increasingly clear looking at the early results from those counties that Jones had a real chance of winning when those numbers kept rolling in.  The benchmarks I outlined on Tuesday almost all came through, and in some cases vastly exceeded expectations...

I said that Jefferson County, home to Birmingham and many of its suburbs, needed to come in at 67% for Doug Jones if he had a realistic chance of winning.  Jones won with 68%.

I predicted that Madison County, home to the professional-heavy city of Huntsville, needed to be in the 57-58% range for Jones.  Jones got 57%.

I knew suburban Shelby County, usually the county that produces the widest advantage of Republican votes in the state, would still go for Roy Moore, but said Moore would still be sitting pretty well statewide if he managed 62% of the vote or higher in Shelby County.  Shelby County reported late and crushed any hope for Moore when he only got a paltry 56% in this GOP stronghold.

On the Gulf Coast, I figured Jones would need about 55% in Mobile County and Moore would have to be held down to about 63% in very conservative suburban Baldwin County next door.  On Tuesday night, Jones got 56% in Mobile County and Moore only got 61% in Baldwin County.

I said Jones would need to do even better that Obama did in the "Black Belt" counties stretching from Selma to Tuskegee to Phenix City.  Jones did do better than Obama.  Jones needed to win Montgomery County, the population center of the Black Belt, with more than 70% of the vote.  He got 72%. I also said the ribbon of Black Belt counties needed to be wider than usual, encompassing a bunch of counties on the periphery of the Black Belt like Conecuh, Choctaw, and Chambers.  Jones won all of them, and a few more, like Pickens, Clarke, and Butler counties.

Jones got some of his best overperformances of the Democratic baseline in the college counties of Tuscaloosa and Lee (Auburn).  I figured 53% would likely be Jones' ceiling in Tuscaloosa County....but Jones got 57%.  And I figured Jones would consider himself lucky if Moore only narrowly won Lee County, but instead Jones won it....with 57%!  It was when I saw that Lee County number roll in, with less than two-thirds of the overall vote in, that I began to think Jones would be favored to win from that point forward in the night.

And Jones would need just about every vote he could wrestle in the aforementioned counties because the rest of the state rolled in big for Moore, depressingly so in northern Alabama, which for decades and as recently as a decade ago was the Democratic base.  Only Colbert County, the heart of old-school Democratic populism in northwest Alabama a generation ago, was even close...and Moore won it by 6 points.  Everything else was landslide Moore country.  The most striking number came from Marion County, a couple of counties south of Colbert, which voted twice for Bill Clinton in the 90s, among many other Democrats even in the post civil rights era.  On Tuesday, Roy Moore got 78% of the vote in Marion County.  Add in the landslide Moore margins in the more heavily populated northern exurbs of Birmingham and the Wiregrass region in the southeast corner of the state and it puts into context how high the bar was for Jones to cross....yet cross it he did.

I had been skeptical of this race from the beginning as the prospect of Democratic victory in modern-day Alabama was so unthinkable.  I still think the seat is a rental, the kind of race only winnable in perfect storm special elections like Tuesday night....and with Presidential level turnout in 2020 when the seat is up again, Jones would be lucky to get to 42%.  Holding his coalition will be particularly daunting, alienating his conservative supporters if he governs to the left and alienating his base if he governs to the right.  But that's three years away.  For now, Democrats should bask in the glow of this crazy victory.  They can't read too much into the result because of the unique circumstances, but they are one seat closer to picking up the inside straight needed to win back the Senate in 2018....and Doug Jones deserves all the credit in the world for that.

Election Day in Alabama

A week ago, I was pretty confident that Roy Moore had tremendous momentum, consolidating the conservative vote after getting "permission" of sort by Governor Ivey and President Trump to vote for Moore based on raw partisanship of the sort that plays in Alabama more than just about anywhere else in the country.  With the day of reckoning officially arrived, I still think Moore is gonna win, and probably win big, but it's less clear that he has momentum than it appeared last week.  Polls are all over the place because it's very hard to gauge who is gonna turn out in a special election on a Tuesday in December and thus tough to model the polling in a way that in any way reflects what the December 12th electorate looks like.  It's usually a pretty safe bet to err on the side of grumpy old white guys when it comes to who turns out at a special election, but the nature of this race throws that into question and every metric of "enthusiasm" from crowd size at rallies to yard sign prevalence points to Jones. 

Since it's almost impossible to predict how this race plays out beyond a gut observation that the "silent majority" in a right-wing state like Alabama will default on the side of the candidate with the magic (R) next to his name, I thought it would be helpful to point to some geographic guideposts of where to look and what to look for on the election map tonight.

First and foremost, Birmingham, in Jefferson County.  Alabama's largest and most cosmopolitan area is 40% black and the county has been trending Democratic the last few cycles, having gone twice for Obama and for Hillary Clinton in 2016.  But Jones needs to blow the roof off there, winning over country club Republican moderates in mostly white areas of suburban Birmingham.  Roy Moore's Democratic challenger for the state Supreme Court in 2012 got to 63% in Jefferson County.  Most observers expect Doug Jones needs to get to 67% there tonight if Jones has any realistic chance of a statewide win.

The second most important county is Madison County in the far northern part of the state, home of the new economy city of Huntsville which has a lot of technology workers.  This is a Republican county generally but Moore didn't win here in 2012 and I doubt he will tonight.  But Jones need a substantial win here tonight to be competitive statewide.  I'd hold up 57% or 58% as a baseline for what Jones needs to get if he wants to counter Moore's advantages elsewhere.

Shelby County is the most heavily populated suburban county in Alabama, just to the south of Birmingham.  It's always been a Republican stronghold and will go very strong for Roy Moore tonight, but Moore's fate depends largely on how strong.  I believe Donald Trump got 76% in Shelby County.  If Jones is to win, he'll want to trim Roy Moore's Shelby County victory to about 62% at the highest.

The Gulf Coast counties of Mobile and Baldwin are also very important as a microcosm of Jefferson and Shelby Counties in central Alabama.  Mobile County has an urban base (second largest city in Alabama) and voted against Moore in his narrow 2012 win for state Supreme Court justice.  Jones needs a decisive high-single-digit win in Mobile County tonight too.  Mostly suburban Baldwin County to Mobile's east votes a lot like archconservative Shelby County in central Alabama, typically going about 3-1 Republican.  Tonight, if Moore is pulling in 63% of the vote or better in Baldwin, he's probably winning statewide.

Democrats need to run up the score in the "Black Belt", the former epicenter of Alabama's plantation country that has rich black farm soil and a majority African-American population.  The capital city of Montgomery is part of the Black Belt and needs to come in big for Jones (at least 70%).  Historically famous smaller cities like Selma and Tuskegee are also in the Black Belt, and those counties had better be at least 75% Jones.  It's a certainty that there will be a ribbon of blue counties running from west-central to east-central Alabama on the county map tonight, but pay attention to the margins and how wide that ribbon is.  If it's wide, that means that counties like Clarke, Conecuh, Cherokee, and Chambers, on the periphery of the Black Belt with substantial but less than majority black populations went for Jones, which would be very good news for him.

The college towns of Tuscaloosa (Tuscaloosa County) and Auburn (Lee County) need to run much stronger for Jones tonight than typical Democrats.  Jones needs to win Tuscaloosa County outright, probably by at least five points, and hold his losses to a few points in Lee County to win statewide.

The largely white rural counties in the northern tier of Alabama counties, particularly the northwest corner, used to be a dependable part of the Democratic coalition in Alabama, dating back to the Tennessee Valley Authority days and lasting through the mid-2000s, but it's slipped away in recent cycles and I'm not confident it's gonna go for Jones tonight.  If Jones is winning counties like Colbert, Lawrence, and Marion in northern Alabama, it's a very good sign for him.  Along the same lines, Moore's home county of Etowah, home to the small city of Gadsden, is in the northern third of Alabama and for decades was a strong Democratic county.  Moore has never done great there, only getting 55% in 2012, and while I'm pretty sure he'll win Etowah County tonight, he might only win by single digits if Jones is having a good night.

Outside of that we're looking at rural, exurban, or small city counties that are likely to be Moore strongholds.  The counties just north of Birmingham such as Blount, St. Clair, and Walker should be some of Moore's strongest counties and will be likely to go 65% or better for Moore.  The Wiregrass area in the state's southeast corner, with the population center being Houston County (Dothan) will be solid Moore as well, but the best the Democrats can hope for is depressed turnout.

A bunch of things will have to go right for Jones to eke out a win.  It's entirely possible it could happen, but if you're using this blog post as a guide tracking the results and Jones is falling short of the benchmarks I'm listing in just about any of them, he won't win.  Since there hasn't been a close election in Alabama in 15 years, I don't have a good idea on what part of the state rolls in first versus what rolls in later in the night, so tonight will be relatively uncharted waters in results tracking.  Unless it's clear right away that Moore is gonna win, it should be an exciting night.

What The Trump Tax Cut Could Mean Politically

The United States Senate just passed a giant tax reform bill this weekend on a nearly party-line vote.  It's not law yet but at this point it seems like a done deal and it could plow through the House and be signed by the President this coming week.  It's a striking "accomplishment" considering how incredibly unpopular the legislation is.  It's polling as the least popular tax legislation of the last 40 years, which amusingly, includes past tax increases such as 1991.  And most analyses have indicated millions of Americans will be paying higher taxes as a result of this reform right away next year while more than a third of Americans will be paying more several years down the road.

It's very hard to find any economist or serious person across the political spectrum who believes this tax bill is sound policy.  There are the usual partisan cheerleaders of the Sean Hannity ilk who are hyping it, but even conservative analysts with scholarship in economics or a background in tax policy are giving it a giant thumbs-down.  Even ardent supply-side Kool-Aid drinkers like Larry Kudlow are raising some red flags about this legislation. On the other hand, it's being pushed through almost unanimously by Republicans in Congress, even those who are considered moderates, and the conventional wisdom by pundits and Beltway insiders is that this is a political kamikaze mission by Republicans.  So why the disconnect even on the right side of the aisle?

There are a number of reasons, but the bottom line is that Congressional Republicans have decided that, on balance, their party's interest is best served by getting this legislation through, and from a shameless tactical standpoint, I don't necessarily think they're wrong.  First of all, this tax bill is one massive payola to the GOP's corporate and multimillionaire campaign donors, i.e. the most important people on the planet to them.  If Republicans made it through this Congressional session without a multi-trillion-dollar financial reward for their campaign investments, the money would stop rolling in for the 2018 cycle and likely into 2020 and possibly beyond.  This would disadvantage Republicans across the country in advertising and on-the-ground campaign operation and that alone would likely make the difference in hundreds of local, legislative, and Congressional races.

Second, the tax bill includes a doubling of the basic exemption and a huge increase in the child tax credit.  This is important because that will likely result in frontloaded tax cuts for most downscale whites in Middle America, i.e. the Trump base.  The Democrats will be grumbling about the "middle-class" who get stiffed on the tax cut, the disproportionate amount of benefits going to corporations and the rich, and how the tax cuts will disappear several years down the road, and while they'll be right, Trump and the GOP can simply ask the average working-class household from Ohio and Michigan if they paid less in taxes in 2018, 2019, and 2020, and most of them will be able to say yes.

Third, foisting even more of the nation's tax burden primarily on blue states with higher state tax rates by eliminating the state and local tax deduction is clever politics that allows the majority of the country to be given tax cuts at the expense of a handful of states that are off the table for Republicans in national and even state-level elections.  The few members of Congress who probably did really screw themselves with this vote are House Republicans from blue states whose upper-middle-class constituents will see immediate and substantial tax increases next year because of the removal of the SALT deduction.  This includes more than a dozen House Republicans from California who went off a cliff supporting this tax bill, but from a macro perspective on the GOP's part, triaging this already-shrinking faction of their caucus made sense in their cynical long-term numbers game of tax policy.  With that said, if the Republicans lose the House next year, expect their losses to come disproportionately from losses in California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.

Fourth, by ensuring such a huge chunk of resources to corporate spreadsheets and multimillionaire stock dividents that would otherwise be going to the federal government in revenues, the Republicans straitjacket their opposition from ever being able to go on offense with a progressive agenda that they fear could be popular in the pending era of scarcity and Latin American-level inequality.  Not only would this reallocation of resources to the very rich prevent a future Democratic President and/or Congress from enacting the progressive wish list of single-payer health care or universal basic income, it would likely force cuts in the existing safety net, particularly Social Security and Medicare.  While forcing cuts to those programs would be politically unpopular to Republicans, they recognize the likelihood that they'll be passing that particular hot potato to Democrats assuming partisan control at some point changes hands in the next 10 years.

All of this certainly comes with risks for Republicans even for the short-term.  The legislation remains very unpopular and the backdoor repeal of the individual mandate for Obamacare could blow up the insurance markets in 2018 and result in massive premium hikes for nearly everybody.  And if the economy fails to experience any measurable growth felt on Main Street, or even tapers off after the current "tax reform bubble" in the stock market mellows out and Wall Street's current sugar high ends, it's big trouble for Republicans in 2020.  But looking at all the angles of the risk analysis, it becomes easier to see why passing this legislation ended up being such an easy lift politically for Republicans despite the objections even from good-faith supply-siders who've been joined at the hip with Republican tax orthodoxy for a half century now.  The legislation is indefensibly and irrefutably terrible public policy, but it just might be good politics for Republicans who have proven themselves beyond shame repeatedly now.