AL-SEN Moves From Toss Up to Lean Republican
Alabama Democratic Senator Doug Jones was always going to be the most endangered incumbent in 2020. He narrowly won a 2017 special election over Roy Moore, the deeply flawed and controversial GOP nominee, and has had a target on his back ever since. But the perfect storm that helped Jones become the first Democratic senator Alabama had elected in a quarter-century won’t be replicated this November.
Yes, Moore — who faced allegations of sexual misconduct toward teenage girls from decades earlier that surfaced during the race — is running again. But the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice is now persona non grata within Republican circles after losing and has virtually no chance of winning the nomination. The March 3 primary looks to be coming down to former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose vacancy of this seat led to Jones’s victory in the first place, with former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville and Rep. Bradley Byrne fighting for a slot in the runoff. We’ll have more analysis on that primary in next week’s newsletter.
Jones’s electoral prognosis was grim even before he announced today he will indeed vote to convict and remove President Trump in the Senate impeachment trial. That’s not a winning vote to take in a state Trump carried by 28 points four years ago, will easily win again this year and remains incredibly popular in. Our analysis that this race is moving away from Jones, no matter what he does, solely on the fundamentals would have been the same had he voted to acquit Trump.
Jones isn’t even among the most bipartisan senators. For the 115th Congress, the Lugar Center ranked Jones as the 36th in bipartisanship. FiveThirtyEight finds that Jones has voted with Trump 36.8% of the time, putting him behind other Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. And he was also ranked behind all four Democrats who lost in 2018 — North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, Florida’s Bill Nelson and Indiana’s Joe Donnelly. Of that quartet of states, only North Dakota voted for Trump by a larger margin than Alabama.
https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/senate/alabama-senate/alabama-senate-moves-toss-lean-republican
= new reply since forum marked as read
