Alabama Senate: Can Doug Jones beat Roy Moore with Hillary Clinton's failed strategy?
He's trying to win over disaffected Republicans instead of firing up the base. Sorry, Democrats, in a polarized era, that probably won't work.
Democrat Doug Jones is trying to defeat embattled Republican Roy Moore in Alabama’s special Senate election Tuesday by trying to persuade disaffected Republican voters to choose him over Moore. Key to Jones’ “persuasion” strategy is to avoid reminding Alabama’s conservative voters that he’s a Democrat. This is evident in his campaign messaging, which is focused exclusively on Moore’s unsuitability for office, given the multiple women who have come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct.
It seems plausible, but Democrats be warned: it is the same strategy deployed by Hillary Clinton in her failed bid for the White House last year.
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Jones is relying on the flawed assumption that he will succeed in doing something unheard of in this polarized era: convince a significant portion of the opposition party’s voters to defect. By far, the most powerful predictor of vote choice today is partisanship. Since 2000, party loyalty rates in presidential elections have averaged 89.2% for Democrats and 91.4% for Republicans. That is to say, if I know nothing about you except your partisan identification, I can predict your vote choice with almost perfect accuracy. In a state where Republicans have a 14-point partisan advantage, siphoning off a substantial share of Republican votes is critical to Jones’ victory.
Recent history shows us just how improbable it would be to flip a significant number of Republican voters. Despite Mitt Romney’s dramatic primary-season appeal to Republicans to reject Trump and the millions of dollars spent against him, in the end he became the nominee and 88% of Republican voters chose him in the general election — even when they had deep reservations about his temperament and capabilities to serve.
The parallels between Donald Trump and Roy Moore are considerable: both are seen as temperamentally and behaviorally unfit for the office sought. Both face multiple, credible accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse. And both use the allegations against them as evidence of a vast “Establishment” conspiracy. It’s worth noting that despite his issues, Donald Trump carried Alabama by nearly 30 points.
For many Republican voters it will come down to a simple calculus, one summed up nicely by Alabama’s Republican governor when she admitted she believed his accusers, but needed the seat to stay in the party’s hands. It’s the exact same calculus that many Republican voters made in 2016 when they voted for Trump. For all of his flaws, Trump offered Republican voters a (mostly) Republican platform and an opportunity to hold control of the Supreme Court. In the polarized era, partisans will vote for their own party’s nominee, even if it means sending a sexual predator to Washington.
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It is also worth noting that Jones could have gone with an alternative strategy to his persuasion campaign. Backlash to Trump has galvanized Democrats everywhere. Anti-Trump fervor combined with distress about the prospect of a Sen. Roy Moore provides the perfect catalyst for mobilizing huge numbers of Democrats to dramatically reshape the partisan composition of the Alabama electorate.
Over 700,000 Alabamans cast ballots for Clinton in 2016, enough to give Jones a fighting chance to win this special election. Instead of minimizing partisan appeals in order to woo unwinnable Republicans, Jones might have been better off focusing on mobilizing an already motivated Democratic base by embracing the national implications of the race and drawing from the Democratic Party’s deep bench — bringing in the Obamas, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren to campaign on his behalf and fire up voters.
The Clinton team’s failure to convert many Republicans in the 2016 presidential election shows the limits of “persuasion” politics. In the polarized era, it’s all about the base.
Rachel Bitecofer is assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University and author ofThe Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election. Follow her on Twitter: @RachelBitecofer