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.
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.
posted by Mark at 8:22 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home