“At some point, we’ve got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.”
— Former NBA star Charles Barkeley, campaigning for Doug Jones (D) in Alabama.
“At some point, we’ve got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.”
— Former NBA star Charles Barkeley, campaigning for Doug Jones (D) in Alabama.
The last polls close in Alabama’s U.S. Senate special election at 8 p.m. ET.
Nate Silver: “Because Alabama rarely hosts competitive races, the benchmarks we might use in another state won’t be as reliable as usual. Furthermore, it’s not just the margins in particular counties that matter, it’s also the level of turnout. As a result, everyone (including us) is going to be more cautious than usual in ‘calling’ a winner or even characterizing who’s ahead until a fair number of votes have been counted… Buckle up for what could be a long night.”
David Wasserman has an excellent follow-at-home model estimating the vote shares Jones and Moore need to exceed in each of Alabama’s 67 counties to win tonight.
NBC News and FiveThirtyEight have good live blogs featuring analysis as the results come in.
The New York Times has live election results.
CNN: “The earliest the state could certify a winner would be December 26, but the secretary of state’s office does not expect the canvassing board to be able to do so until January 3, and it could be even later, delayed by slow canvassing by the counties and jam-packed holiday schedules between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Once it does, that certification would be sent to Washington immediately. Once the winner is certified, the Senate would likely in swear that person quickly.”
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President Trump’s approval in the early Alabama exit polls is very interesting: 48% approve, 48% disapprove. Trump won Alabama in the 2016 presidential election with 62%.
But what’s even more interesting is the intensity: 32% strongly approve, 41% strongly disapprove.
Nate Silver: “From the tidbits the networks have released, it’s fair to characterize the exit polls — showing Trump’s approval rating only breakeven, a relatively high proportion of nonwhite voters, and a relatively narrow gap between Democratic and Republican turnout — as containing mostly favorable news for Jones. In general, these numbers are more consistent with the pre-election polls that had shown Jones tied or ahead, and not the ones that had Moore winning.”
New York Times: “With only hours until the polls open on Tuesday in this unlikeliest of battleground states, Democrats are deploying a sprawling, multimillion-dollar get-out-the-vote operation in an effort to steal away a Senate seat and reduce the Republican majority to a single vote.”
“A constellation of liberal groups outside the state has showered money and manpower on turnout efforts aimed at helping Mr. Jones. But they are working discreetly, hoping to avoid the appearance of trying to dictate whom Alabamians should support.”
“It’s a much more poisonous atmosphere. I don’t know if there’s causality or correlation, I leave that for others to determine. But I could not honestly say to someone that I like and think is a halfway decent human being, ‘Yeah, you ought to run for office’.”
— Ed Gillespie, quoted by the Washington Post, in his first interview after losing the Virginia gubernatorial race.
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) told WBUR that he supports the Democrat running for U.S. Senate in Alabama against Roy Moore.
Said Baker: “I certainly don’t want to see Roy Moore win. That means, obviously, that I would be supporting the alternative.”
First Read: “New data provided to NBC News puts the universe of registered voters at 3,326,812 ahead of a hotly contested special Senate election on Tuesday in Alabama. Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, has already increased his turnout prediction from 18 to 20 percent last month now to upwards of 25 percent, reflecting the degree to which interest in the contest between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones locally is catching up with national attention.”
“But as local election officials prepared for polls to open Tuesday there were indications that turnout could be even higher still, approaching levels in some cases typically seen in midterm general elections. And neither party is willing to suggest what that says about the final outcome.”
Polling places in Alabama close at 8:00 pm ET.
Bloomberg: “Bannon worked to create a counter-narrative that ultimately would change many Republicans’ perception of the Roy Moore scandal. A former filmmaker, he’s long been captivated by the propaganda films of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi filmmaker, and the Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein for their power to shape public sentiment.”
“Earlier this year, Bannon told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer his 2012 anti-Obama film The Hope and the Change, had consciously mimicked Riefenstahl’s infamous, Triumph of the Will. Her film, he added, ‘seared into me’ that unhappy voters could be influenced if they felt they were being conned.”
“A defiant Roy Moore returned to the campaign trail Monday evening, delivering a thundering speech at an election eve rally in which he implored Alabamians to ignore outsiders who he said were bent on stopping him in the Senate special election,” Politico reports.
Said Moore: “We dare to defend our rights and we will defend our rights. We’re up to our neck in people that don’t want change in Washington, D.C., they want to keep their power, keep it the same, keep their positions, and we’ve got to change that.”
Olivia Nuzzi: “Roy Moore emerges from hiding for election eve rally, and good lord, was it weird.”
Nate Silver: “Because you’ve read so much detail about the polls, I don’t want to leave you without some characterization of the race. I still think Moore is favored, although not by much; Jones’s chances are probably somewhere in the same ballpark as Trump’s were of winning the Electoral College last November (about 30 percent).”
“The reason I say that is because in a state as red as Alabama, Jones needs two things to go right for him: He needs a lopsided turnout in his favor, and he needs pretty much all of the swing voters in Alabama (and there aren’t all that many of them) to vote for him. Neither of these are all that implausible. But if either one goes wrong for Jones, Moore will probably win narrowly (and if both go wrong, Moore could still win in a landslide). The stakes couldn’t be much higher for the candidates — or for the pollsters who surveyed the race.”
A new Change Research poll in Alabama finds Roy Moore (R) leading Doug Jones (D) by six points in tomorrow’s U.S. Senate special election, 51% to 45%.
Earlier, we also had a Fox News poll that showed Jones leading by ten points and a Monmouth poll that, depending on turnout model, showed both candidates either ahead or tied.
For members: No One Knows Who Will Win In Alabama
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged Alabamians to vote in tomorrow’s special Senate election, the Birmingham News reports.
Said Rice: “This week’s special election will be one of the most significant in Alabama’s history. As a native daughter, I remain – at heart – an Alabaman who loves our state and its devotion to faith, family, and country.”
She added: “I encourage you to take a stand for our core principles and for what is right. These critical times require us to come together to reject bigotry, sexism, and intolerance.”
A new Monmouth poll in Alabama finds slight differences in turnout could dramatically change the outcome of tomorrow’s special U.S. Senate election.
Said pollster Patrick Murray: “In a typical year, we would probably default to the historical model, which shows Moore ahead. It could still end up that way, but both 2016 and 2017 suggest that typical models may not apply. If we see a surge in Democratic turnout, especially in the Birmingham region, Jones has a chance.”
A new Fox News poll in Alabama finds Doug Jones (D) with a 10-point lead over Roy Moore (R) in the U.S. Senate special election, 50% to 40%.
Big caveat: “This race’s uniqueness is significant. It is impossible to know who will show up to vote in a special election to fill a seat in the middle of a term in an off-year. And it’s December, a time when people expect to be going to the shopping mall, not the voting booth.”
Also interesting: “A subtle but potentially noteworthy finding is Alabama voters who were interviewed on cellphones are +30 for Jones, while the race is roughly even among all others. The fact that traditional, high-quality probability samples, like the Fox News Poll, include both landline and cellphone numbers may be why these polls show Jones doing relatively well compared to automated or blended polls.”
Former president Barack Obama “is adding his voice to the Alabama Senate race, imploring voters to go to the polls Tuesday to reject the candidacy of Roy Moore as part of an aggressive effort by Democrats to try and counter President Trump’s full-throated endorsement of the controversial Republican candidate,” CNN reports.
Said Obama: “This one’s serious. You can’t sit it out.”
Obama’s message is intended to specifically reach black voters whose turnout is critical for Democratic candidate Doug Jones.
Politico says former vice president Joe Biden also recorded a robocall.
Politico: “White House aides advised the president against getting involved in the contest, and his endorsement is a testament to the futility of trying to guide a boss guided by instinct who relishes taunting the political establishment he now runs. That includes not just McConnell but members of his own staff and even his daughter Ivanka, whose harsh words for Moore worked only to push the president in the opposite direction.”
“Trump had experienced a similar desertion in the summer of 2016 when the infamous ‘Access Hollywood’ tape surfaced. He was angered to see the same establishment figures now ditching Moore.”
Michael Warren: Why did Trump go all-in for Roy Moore?
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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