Make no mistake: It is nothing short of extraordinary that sexual predator Roy Moore is still standing as the Republican candidate for Alabama's senate seat. His continued presence, despite the efforts of Washington Republicans, and the state party's decision to stand by their man, so to speak, represents a total and complete collapse of the Republican party. The separation between the electoral concerns of Washington lawmakers and a voting base in the states completely divorced from reality is complete.
Having Moore on the ballot presents no good outcomes whatsoever for Republicans. If he wins, Mitch McConnell and his caucus will be saddled with his presence and may face taking extraordinary measures to try to oust him, which will leave the GOP base frothing at the mouth with anger. Yet if Senate Republicans fail to jettison Moore, his predatory pedophilia will be the millstone around the neck of every Republican candidate heading into 2018, which already promises to be a year in which Democrats field a historic number of female candidates. And if Moore loses, Republicans will be down one seat in the Senate—to a razor thin 51-49 majority, leaving no room for error on any upcoming votes and jumpstarting the Democrats' once implausible bid to take back the Senate in 2018.
Through it all, the manchild who's supposedly the standard bearer of the Republican party, chickened out of taking a stand on Moore, not because of the clear hypocrisy it would represent given his own history of sexual assault, but rather because he's literally "gripped with fear" about betting on the wrong horse again and becoming a two-time loser in the Alabama Senate race. By all accounts of Washington reporters, Trump's calculation was purely a political one isolated to this particular race and whether taking a stand and losing would reflect badly on him, not to mention alienate his base.
That Trump is an amoral, small-minded, selfish bottom-feeder isn't exactly news. But his inability to provide even a scintilla of leadership to a party divided against itself does provide Democrats with a remarkable opening to think so much bigger about the possibilities in 2018.
One of the biggest mistakes Democrats and allied groups made in 2016 was lavishing hundreds of millions of dollars on messages to white swing voters while practically ignoring voters of color, who had accounted for 46 percent of Democratic votes in 2012. In November of 2016, The Nation's Steve Phillips wrote:
When plans for the first $100 million of outside spending were announced in the spring, no money was allocated for mobilization of black voters, who made up 23 percent of all registered Democratic voters in 2012. Eventually, $20 million was moved to efforts to turn out black voters, but that was still less than 10 percent of the more than $200 million spent by the outside groups.
It should surprise no one that African-American turnout declined 10 percent from 2012 levels, contributing to the losses in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Ohio.
It was the first time voter participation by African Americans had decreased in a presidential election in 20 years. Finding the right balance between wooing white swing voters (i.e. voters who can be lured into voting Democratic) and turning out Democratic voters of color (i.e. reliable base votes as long as they get to the polls) has been a heated debate among Democrats ever since 2016.
But what we learned from Virginia should help ease some of the anguish over this debate for several reasons: 1) Trump is so repugnant to college-educated whites that he has created a new class of swing voters ripe for the taking—suburban whites; 2) if voters of color are properly engaged, they do turn out, even in off-year elections; 3) many of the Trump-inspired GOP messages employed in Virginia drove both voters of color and suburban whites toward Democrats.
Turnout in Virginia was up across every region of the state, which also effectively meant that every voting bloc turned out in higher numbers than normal. But Democrat Ralph Northam won a bloc that usually swings Republican in Virginia by as many as 10 points or less—college-educated whites, who went for Northam over Republican Ed Gillespie by 3 points, 51 percent to 48 percent, according to exit polls.
In part, that was because college-educated whites in Virginia were repulsed by Donald Trump, but they also recoiled entirely from the Trumpian racist, anti-immigrant messages Gillespie embraced. Here's how Gillespie's notorious MS-13 street gang ad—which included pictures of menacing, heavily tattooed Latinos—played across all groups, according to an election eve poll by Latino Decisions of 1,735 Virginians (including large samples of Latinos (431), Asian Americans (404), African Americans (403), and whites (497)).
To no one's surprise based on historic trends in the state, Northam won the votes of Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans by decisive margins. Again, let's use the Latino Decisions election eve poll because it's samples of voters of color are so much larger than those of exits polls. (It also bears mentioning that the poll accurately predicted Northam’s 54-45 margin statewide.)
To Phillips' point above, it's worth noting here that Republicans won whites by 16 points, while Democrats won black voters by 81 points and Latino voters by 49 points. Additionally, turnout among blacks and Latinos was higher than expected—with majority black precincts running a seven percent higher turnout than New York Times' models predicted, and majority Latino/Asian precincts running 15 percent higher than predicted.
As I have noted elsewhere, those numbers were partially the result of a concerted effort in the last several weeks of the campaign to engage voters of color. BlackPAC put forth a $1.1 million effort that included a digital ad campaign and canvassing, and Latino groups like CASA in Action ran Spanish-language radio ads and knocked on nearly 58,000 doors.
The onslaught resulted in a double-digit increase in the numbers of Latino, AAPI and African American voters who reported being contacted by a campaign or civic group in the final three weeks of the campaign. There was also a corresponding bump in voters' awareness about both Gillespie's anti-immigrant and racialized policies along with Northam’s pro-immigrant and pro-racial justice policies.
As amazing as the increased awareness, engagement and turnout was among voters of color, what's even more amazing is the eye-popping number of them who still weren't contacted at all:
- 58 percent of Latinos
- 48 percent of Asians
- 49 percent of Blacks
These represent votes that were potentially left on the table by Democrats, especially among African American voters who voted 9 to 1 for Northam in Virginia and have proven to be one of Democrats' most loyal voting blocs at the polls for decades. It's also a voting bloc that could prove decisive in Alabama, according to an analysis by the African American Research Collaborative in conjunction with Latino Decisions.
Frankly, it's unclear at the moment how much energy, if any, Democrats and affiliated groups have put into engaging voters of color in Alabama. But Roger Vann, executive director of State Voices, noted on a reporter call this week that the effort to turn out black voters in Virginia didn't just begin in the final three weeks of the Northam campaign. There had been a years-long investment in civic engagement in the state and the final push succeeded in part because about 250,000 black voters had been registered to vote over the last couple years, among other things. Vann called it a "perfect storm."
"But the difference has been the long-term investment in Virgnia," he stressed. "Even a place like Alabama where you don't have the same Virginia ground game, you can't count on that turnout unless there's going to that kind of early investment."
If Virginia proved anything, it's that the early investment in engaging and registering voters of color along with featuring issues that matter to them on the local level is well worth the time and energy.
Alabama Democrat Doug Jones may win Alabama yet. But a big part of the post-mortem should be a hard look at how voters of color either were or weren't engaged and how much that helped or hurt Jones in the end.