How to Build on Alabama

Last night, Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore and picked up an unlikely U.S. Senate seat for Democrats in Alabama. It was a close one – Jones won with 49.9% of the vote against 48.4% for Moore and 1.7% for write-ins. Before getting to the good news, though, it’s worth noting that the Republican Party came within 20,000 votes of putting a theocratic pedophile in the Senate. That’s awful, and we should not be confused about the awfulness of the current Republican Party at pretty much every level.

Jones won for a variety of reasons, not least of all the good fortune of drawing a terrible opponent. For Democrats, his victory is encouraging because he ran as a solid, unapologetic Democrat. He offered passionate arguments for Democratic policies. He refused to be ashamed of his support for minority rights or women’s reproductive freedom. The fact that Jones won without basing his candidacy on appeals to the “white-working class” proves that Democrats can win with or without these people. Indeed, it’s quite possibly the case that the Democratic Party is more likely to win races in Republican-leaning districts by motivating its own base to get out and vote. The exit polling suggests as much (all tables borrowed from CNN):

Table 1: does doug jones share your values?

	jones	moore	no answer
yes 48%	96%	4%	n/a
no 49%	6%	91%	3%

2387 respondents

Only 6% of people who said Jones did not share their values were willing to vote for him. He won because people who support him and the Democratic Party’s agenda were willing to go out and vote.

Table 2: vote by race and sex

	jones	moore	no answer
white men 35%	26%	72%	2%
white women 31%	34%	63%	3%
black men 11%	93%	6%	1%
black women 17%	98%	2%	n/a
latino men 1%	n/a	n/a	n/a
latino women 2%	n/a	n/a	n/a
all others 3%	n/a	n/a	n/a

2387 respondents

The savviest voters in the United States are black women, and it is not even close. Their 98% support for Jones follows their 96% support for Hillary Clinton in 2016. I interpret these numbers to mean that black women as a group are the most aware of their own interests and the public interest. Another way to think about it is they are the least confused about the consequences of their votes. Democrats need to step up their efforts to gain black women’s support, and that must be alongside a national fight to protect and reestablish voting rights for all Americans. Jones would have won more comfortably yesterday if more black Alabamians had been able to vote.

Table 3: vote by age

	jones	moore	no answer
18-24 8%	59%	40%	1%
25-29 5%	62%	35%	3%
30-39 12%	66%	32%	2%
40-49 20%	53%	46%	1%
50-64 32%	46%	53%	1%
65 and older 23%	40%	59%	1%

2387 respondents

I wish CNN could have broken this table out by race, but perhaps it did not because of sample size issues. In any case, these numbers clearly show Democratic Party strength with Alabamians under the age of 50 and especially under the age of 40, a pattern I would bet exists in most other states. As an aside, I wonder if Democratic strength in my own 30-39 cohort has to do with our experience of the younger George Bush’s presidency and what an epic disaster that was. We American voters tend to solidify our party loyalty in our 20s and 30s.

Table 4: vote by party and ideology

	jones	moore	write-ins	no answer
liberal democrats 16%	98%	2%	n/a	n/a
mod./conserv. democrats 20%	98%	2%	n/a	n/a
independents 21%	52%	43%	5%	n/a
mod./liberal republicans 9%	21%	79%	0%	n/a
conservative republicans 33%	5%	94%	2%	n/a

2387 respondents

This table suggests that independents do not actually exist. Moore’s candidacy was the perfect experiment for trying to tease out whether “independents” are truly independent or are party loyalists with a self-proclaimed independent identity. All other things being equal, a true independent would be unlikely to vote for someone like Moore. He had been credibly accused of sexual assault and pedophilia, he refused to debate Jones, and he committed many other sins expected to offend independents. Yet only 52% of Alabamian independents went for Jones while 43% went for Moore. That’s nearly a coin flip. If independents were real (truly independent) they would be expected to skew heavily towards Jones, probably to the tune of 60-80%.

The moral of this story is do not fetishize independents. Democrats should not tailor messaging to this group because it is an ideological mess: independents are overwhelmingly loyal Democratic voters and loyal Republican voters, while some are simply uninformed about politics and make up their mind about whom to vote for the day of an election.

Conclusion

There are many reasons to think the Republican Party is in trouble for the 2018 midterm elections, but that does not mean Democratic victories are inevitable. To take back the House and/or the Senate, Democrats need to run strong candidates (Jones was a great candidate, especially for Alabama), they need to know who their voters really are, they need to make it easier for them to vote, and they need to motivate them to vote. Appealing to the better angels of Republican voters’ natures is a mug’s game.