Can Democrat Doug Jones win in Alabama this December 12th?

The road to the U.S. Senate may lie through Talladega County, but the underlying Republican tendencies of the state may be hard for Jones and the Democrats to overcome

Future Democratic victories will likely be a smaller set of counties, increasingly urban and less dependent on the rural white population in the state

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The polls suggest that the Alabama Special Election for U.S. Senate is a “tossup” but barring the unexpected, such as further allegations of sexual misconduct, or an officially endorsed Republican write-in campaign by the RNC, Roy Moore will likely become Alabama’s next Senator, probably by a margin of 2-5 percentage points on election day.

Elections are supposedly determined by three factors in varying degrees – party, campaign and candidates. Alabama is one of the most Republican states in the country. Counties that trend Republican do so much quicker, to a much greater extent and are overall a lot more numerous than the very few counties that trend Democrat in this state. Simply put, the Republicans have a lot more room for error if a particular locality does not deliver a needed margin. The Democrats have no such margin of error.

ALABAMA POLITICS – THE LAST 50 YEARS SUMMARIZED

The last time Democrats predominated in this state is measured not in years but in decades. Nearly two decades ago was the last time a candidate for Governor won election, a quarter century ago that the last Democrat won a U.S. Senate election and more than four decades ago that a Presidential candidate carried the state. Since that time, and especially in the last ten years, the political map has been redrawn significantly.

The gradual shift towards the Republicans which began with Barry Goldwater’s decisive win here in 1964 became a stampede in the mid-2000s. The once solidly Democrat blue state (except for Winston County, as readers of How to Kill a Mockingbird might recall) has now seen most of the rural, predominantly white parts of the state move decisively towards the Republicans, taking with them all the statewide offices, elected judicial positions, plus both chambers of the State Legislature. Here in Tennessee, the joke is that the entire Democratic State Senate caucus can now fit inside a minivan. In Alabama, it would be augmented by two but still quite possibly the case if you had a full-size van.

The last statewide election win by a Democrat was a very narrow win (less than 1%) by Lucy Baxley for the Public Service Commission in 2008, carrying 37 counties in so doing. She would lose the next election four years later by more than an 8% margin.

An election in 2006 for the Lieutenant Governor may be more instructive. In that year, a year good for Democrats nationally, Democrat Jim Folsom Jr., son of the famous Governor “Big Jim” Folsom and himself both previously a Governor and Lieutenant Governor in his own right, narrowly eked out a win over Republican Luther Strange (the current U.S. Senator) in carrying 45 counties. This was Strange’s first run for statewide office. The map below shows how each county voted in that election.

As you can see in the picture to the left, as recently as 2006 there could be a lot of Democratic blue on the Alabama political map, even if most of it was lightly-shaded. It is worth noting that a lot of the red on the map is also lightly shaded. You might note that in the northern part of the state, and especially in the very upper left (north-west) corner, there were several light blue counties.

In the grand scheme of things, 11 years may not seem like a lot of time. One might reasonably conclude that the political map of a Democratic Doug Jones victory in Alabama might look something like this map here. All you would have to do is fill in the light blue on a 2017 Special Senate election map to approximately match the map above, right?

NOT SO FAST!!!!

CURRENT ALABAMA POLITICAL CLIMATE

This map is more indicative of the current political climate in Alabama today. It shows the results of last year’s U.S. Presidential election, where the Republican Trump/Pence ticket won the state over the Democratic H. Clinton/Kaine ticket by some 28 points. While this is not a Republican high water mark (Goldwater and Nixon easily surpassed Trump’s 62% win) this map falls roughly in line with the political map since 2004 at the Presidential level (save for Jefferson County/Birmingham – the isolated light blue island towards the center of the map – which has trended from light red to light blue over the same period).

The basic rule of thumb is now this – dark red in the north outside of Birmingham and Huntsville (the lighter shade of red in the very northern part); dark red in the south east, a solid string of blue counties in the “Black Belt” in the south-central part of the state, and lighter red in the other parts of the state. This political alignment sees a 2 to 1 advantage for the Republicans in terms of votes, and even if Jones was to carry the counties containing Huntsville and Mobile (far southwest county jutting into the Gulf of Mexico), at best this might move the Democrats closer to a 3 to 2 disadvantage.

Some might point out that the Folsom race in 2006 could be seen as a more localized race, especially with the Folsom name, and that for many elections after Goldwater’s 1964 win that Alabamians as a whole have almost always split their tickets, voting for Republicans nationally while consistently returning Democrats to the state legislature in Montgomery and routinely electing Democrats to other statewide offices. While the topics of increased polarization and the decline of ticket splitting could both be topics in and of themselves, the evidence is clear. The fact that since 2006 the Democrats have lost control of their last bastion of power – the state legislature, and are now well in the minority in that body, as well as the fact they have only one Congressperson out of 7, and currently hold no other statewide offices or U.S. Senate seats, suggests that the above map is a very accurate portrayal of political realities in Alabama today.

The map to the left captures the 10-year trend between Folsom’s narrow win for the Democrats and Trump’s big win for the Republicans. This corroborates the above account both of Alabama turning increasingly more Republican and that the north, (especially the northwest), and the southeast being big components of this trend.

It is worth noting that several northwestern and northeastern counties which heavily supported the 2016 Republican ticket went for Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984, even as he lost both the national and Alabama election by large double digit margins.

If there is any consolation for the Democrats, it is that larger urban centers of Jefferson (Birmingham) in the middle; Madison (Huntsville) in the far north; Mobile in the far southwest and especially Montgomery towards the southeast have either trended more Democratic (albeit incrementally and slowly) or else largely avoided the collapse of Democratic support elsewhere in those interceding years.

WHAT JONES NEEDS TO DO

The great thing about the 2006 Folsom victory map is that it is reflective of a very tight margin, which is likely what the margin would be if Doug Jones should happen to win. Thus, if you even took a handful of small counties out of the blue column on the Folsom map and made them the lightest shade of red, Luther Stranger would have edged him out in claiming the Lieutenant Governorship that year.

This year it is no different. The basic methodology here was to take some basis of Democratic support and try to build in a sufficient swing enough for Doug Jones to win. At this point we are assuming that there is no officially RNC-supported write-in campaign, and that other write-ins would grab an infinitesimal amount of support. This means we would need to run a model where Jones gets exactly 50.00% of the vote at minimum to win.

The basis used, for reasons noted above, would be the 2016 Presidential election map. Hillary Clinton received a total of 34.36% of the Alabama vote. This would be a swing of 15.64% between her vote in 2016 and what Doug Jones would need to reach the magic 50.00%.

No reliable model could make that a uniform 15.65% swing for each county … for some of the Black Belt counties that would actually put them near or over 100% Democratic support, in other counties, likely those in the northwest part of the state, a 15.64% swing would be probably too optimistic. Other counties such as Jefferson could see Democratic support increase, but much like Memphis/Shelby in west Tennessee, the Republican support would have a floor since you have the Republican-leaning suburbs of Germantown (Memphis) and Hoover (Birmingham). Roy Moore’s home county of Gadsden/Etowah did not get a 15.65% swing, although in the recent past, Etowah had actually voted for Bill Clinton. That said, I tried to use some consistent methodology, after roughly two dozen counties had to have some special adjustment. Simply put, for those remaining counties that did not require a special adjustment, if they were already Democrat trending, they got a swing larger than 15.65%. If the county in question trended more towards the Republicans, they got less than a 15.65% swing.

After trying to break down the overall 15.65% swing into what I thought might be a generous margin for Jones, he was still falling short of the 50.00%. I needed to go back to each of the swing layers and keep bumping them up until, after the third try, (never a promising sign) I was able to reach 50%. I went back and forth on Birmingham but figured that an overall vote percentage there of greater than the mid-60s for Jones would be too unrealistic.

The bottom line is, per my model, Jones must meet all of the following on his to-do list, unless there is some unknown, top secret groundswell of phantom old time rural conservative southern Democrats that I am not aware of.

Those tasks are:

• Increase vote share in the Black Belt (quite possible)
• Increase vote share in Montgomery City/County (also quite possible)
• Increase vote share in Birmingham (very possible, up to a point)
• Pick up Alabama’s 5th largest city, Tuscaloosa, and the surrounding county, immediately south west of Birmingham (possible)
• Flip Madison County/Huntsville by a comfortable margin (doable)
• Flip Mobile City & County by a hefty margin (a bit of a stretch)
• Drastically cut the Republican margins of the two suburban Birmingham counties of St. Clair and Shelby well below 60% (much more of a stretch, although Republican support in St. Clair did not increase between 2012 and 2016, and actually declined in Shelby)
• Come within at least one percentage point of taking Talladega County (shaded in white above – more on this below)
• And, btw, not missing any other projection in any other county in the state

No sweat, right? – just as easy as climbing right out of the Stephens Gap cave – just go straight up!

While Jones has, as previously noted, zero margin for error, a win in Talladega County has the added importance of representing the closest thing to a bell-weather county for Alabama. While several political analysts have cautioned against regarding Talledega as a true bell-weather, noting a slight Democratic lean compared to statewide results, the indisputable fact is that the demographics and household income measures in Talladega are roughly in line with that of the state as a whole. Talladega has roughly paralleled statewide Presidential results as far back as 1980; statewide Senatorial results since 1986, although they did buck the statewide result for Governor as recent as 2006 (going Democratic when the state as a whole decisively elected a Republican Governor).

My modelling has shown that Talladega is the one county under a minimal Jones-wins versus minimal Moore-wins scenario that could actually flip (all the other counties could back the same candidate in both models – albeit in varying shades of their party color). More specifically, the model shows that Jones cannot afford to lose Talladega by more than roughly half a percentage point – otherwise he has likely lost the state as a whole.

WHERE DO THE ALABAMA DEMS GO FROM HERE?

The main takeaway with my model and analysis is that the Democrats could, if the planets aligned correctly, have a path to victory in Alabama but old counties that they used to rely on are no longer there. Instead the path, at least in the short to middle term, is very narrow, and outside of the Black Belt depends heavily on the urban and suburban vote. On a map, a blue-shaded Democratic victory in will cover less counties than it did even a decade ago with Folsom Jr.

In some respects, this is the reverse of a dynamic that helped FDR during the New Deal Years. Beginning in 1932, the Republican-leaning, more urban, industrial states of the north and Midwest quickly flipped into the Democratic column; the small-c conservative, southern rural states, (which were not always amenable to New Deal politics) remained solidly Democratic until several decades later. In Alabama, it is the rural, northern and exurban counties that have quickly flipped by large swings to the solid Republican column since the mid-2000s; the urban areas of Democratic support have grown, but much more slowly.

To be sure, I have only looked at the one aspect of this election – the parties’ areas of core support and areas for growth. Many factors will ultimately determine the outcome between late November and mid-December – potential gaffes, further accusations, new scandals, intra-partisan warfare, an official write-in campaign, etc. This is not to say that dynamics couldn’t change to where Doug Jones could win by more than 50%. This is to simply point out that given the strong partisan leanings of the Yellowhammer state, that Jones has much more of an uphill battle than any Republican candidate in a state which is often the reddest on a national map of all states east of the Mississippi.

So, if this election continues to be neck-and-neck in the polls and people continue to see the allegations of Roy Moore front and center, Jones will definitely have one of the better showings by Democrats in this state, but barring the unexpected, the Alabama political climate is so entrenched in Republican politics that Jones will need every vote he can get.

E. Bucholz 11/25/17