Can Democrats win when the message is “We’re not that guy?”

by | Dec 11, 2017 | Editor's Blog | 6 comments

Tomorrow, Alabama elects its replacement to fill the remainder of the term left vacant when Jeff Session became Attorney General. Polls say that Roy Moore, an accused child molester and disgraced former judge, is likely to defeat Democrat Doug Jones. Moore’s victory will be a blight on the state of Alabama and the Republican Party, but it will be a failure for Democrats. They haven’t even tried to make Jones acceptable to Republican-leaning voters who can’t vote for a child molester but also don’t trust Democrats.

Twitter and Facebook are alive with posts denigrating Roy Moore. One former Obama operative tweeted yesterday, “If the sexual assault doesn’t push you away, recall that Roy Moore also thinks: – Muslims can’t be in Congress – homosexuality should be illegal – America was best during slavery – US is the focus of evil in the world – 9/11 was a divine punishment – Obama isn’t American.” Those might be good arguments to motivate the base, but they’re lousy ones to attract the few conservative-leaning voters Jones needs to win.

A look at Jones’ Youtube channel shows that virtually every ad in the past month is more about Roy Moore than Doug Jones. Jones never clearly defines himself as an outsider or tells how he would be different from the Schumer/Pelosi Democrats in Congress and who scare conservative white Alabama voters. He doesn’t need to win a majority of white voters, but he probably needs more than 30% of them when Clinton only won 15% last year.

A Jones victory depends on a strong African-American turnout but Jones doesn’t offer an economic message that might motivate his African-American base. Instead, his campaign sent out a mailer with a skeptical looking black man on the cover and the header, “Think if a black man went after high school girls anyone would try to make him a senator?” The mailer seems to assume that black voters need to be persuaded to vote against Roy Moore. I doubt that’s true.

To motivate African-Americans, Democrats sent surrogates like Deval Patrick, Cory Booker and John Lewis. They should have also sent Heidi Heitcamp or Joe Manchin or Jon Tester to the state to tell voters how Jones could be different from the Democrats in Washington. Jones needs skeptical conservatives to actually vote for him, not just stay home.

Before the Moore scandal, Jones seemed to be making a case for himself. In October, he ran an ad attacking Washington and making the case he could work across party lines. He followed it up with law-and-order piece that highlighted prosecuting Klansmen who bombed a black church in Birmingham and killed four little girls back in 1963 and, the first week of November, ran piece about fixing health care. Once the scandal broke on November 13, virtually every ad centered on Moore. Jones’ closer is a defense against Moore attacks, not a vision for what he would do differently for Alabama.

Watching the race from 500 miles away and filtered mainly through social media and news reports, may leave me missing nuances that are playing out in the state. I hope so. However, from this vantage point, it appears the Democrats are making the same mistakes they made with Donald Trump. They’ve made the race about the problems with Moore without explaining how Jones would be a different type of Democrat. The Super PACs supporting Jones could keep the pressure on Roy Moore, but Jones should have been burnishing his moderate image, attacking the failures of Washington and offering solutions to problems that affect Alabama families.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that being an accused child molester is still disqualifying for a US Senate candidate. I hope that Doug Jones wins handily tomorrow, with a high African-American turnout and a substantial number of white Alabamans rejecting someone as unqualified as Moore. In the age of Trump, though, I’m skeptical.

6 Comments

  1. Eric smith

    Perhaps Doug Jones could have spent more time dissembling about what kind of Democrat he is. I myself am glad that a Planned Parenthood poster is displayed prominently in his campaign headquarters. But the essence of the campaign can be distilled down to the hate and hypocrisy of the Southern past as represented by Roy Moore and the hopefulness of the New South as exemplified by Doug Jones. Jones has emphasized his successful effort to reprosecute the KKK perpetrators of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing. His campaign website has featured a moving video of Jones recounting his determination to bring those men to justice. The campaign between Moore and Jones also led to this powerful video of an Alabama peanut farmer protesting at the Roy Moore rally last night. Mr. Mathis speaks with an authentic Southern voice saying that we can and must do better. How Jones will vote on tax reform is important, but I would argue that the social issues in this truly special election are paramount
    . https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/12/11/how-is-my-daughter-a-pervert-alabama-dads-plain-spoken-rebuke-of-roy-moore-strikes-a-nerve/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_alabama-father-1148pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.c87b6f2273f0

  2. tbt

    On the other hand, when GOP candidates are pedophiles and when their incumbents are pushing outlandishly harmful tax legislation; throwing millions off healthcare; threatening to cut Medicare, SocSec, and Medicaid; turning national parks into mining areas; and suppressing voting rights, it does not go unnoticed. And when you add to that mix a GOP POTUS with an approval rating of 35% (for many reasons), then maybe Dem campaigns that shout “We ain’t them and won’t do what they do!” aren’t too misguided.

    Enough has been said and written about how the millennial and unaffiliated voters won’t feel warm toward either Repubs or Dems, no matter what those factions do. That said, if the GOP continues to demonstrate a high level of callousness toward the common good, those voters may just choose candidates from a party that, while ill-defined, isn’t patently evil.

    • Eric Smith

      Doug Jones hardly ignored the bread and butter issues that you mentioned. And he almost sabotaged himself by emphasizing his pro choice position. So I don’t think we should complain that he did not talk enough about tax reform, Social Security and affordable healthcare. Doug won because he understood what the election represented to his fellow Alabamians, that it was about the soul of the state. He presented a positive message in that regard and was not simply saying “We’re not that guy.”
      How does a party go about defining itself in terms of specific issues of public policy? Some argue that Bernie Sanders had a clarity of message that Hillary Clinton lacked. There was, however, not a lot of clarity for African Americans as to where Bernie stood on their issues. Ditto for gun control. And Bernie oversimplified the trade issue in a way that resembled what Trump did with his demagoguery on the subject. I wonder if we Democrats might not be better off trying to rebrand our party as the the compassionate “Party of the People” that we have always been, and then reinforcing that brand with specific policy positions on the issues that matter the most.

  3. walt de vries, ph.d.

    What is it with politicians wearing cowboy hats, boots and waving revolvers? “All hat and no cattle.” But, I digress.
    Your comments about the Moore campaign are on the mark because, once again, Washington, D.C. Democrats–especially the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee–have run one of their spectacular “victory” campaigns using TV production and time buys. One example of the DSCC fundraising promotions came on November 30, 2017, boldly announced that they had “launched a POWERFUL NEW AD to reach voters.” Once again, the ghosts of the North Carolina campaigns of Senator Hagan and Deborah Ross s will be flying over Alabama tonight and tomorrow. Cookie-cutter tv ads, Redux.
    These guys have never heard of GOTV (get out the vote).
    Identifying and turning out voters is the name of the game. But with the DSCC TV mania, they haven’t won anything and yet just keep doing it and losing. Know why? Their buddies in the good old boy Washington network make a bundle on each ‘POWERFUL NEW AD” television production and time buy. More important is their obsession with paid
    television as the sine qua non of Senate Democratic campaign strategies.
    On November 30, I wrote Senator Van Hollen, Chair of the DSCC and told him these strategies and tactics may have been relevant in the 1980’s, 1990’s and even into the first ten years of this century–but no longer. It persists because (1) candidate-clients love tv commercials, (2) they are easy to produce, place and require almost no legwork by staff and (3) produce enormous profits for D.C. agencies and consultants. It is the lazy way to “win” campaigns because you can always explain, as the DSCC campaign staff did after Senator Hagan’s loss, that they (DSCC) “had run a perfect campaign, but the candidate…”
    I predicted to Senator Van Hollen that without some hard GOTV work in black neighborhoods and targeted suburbs forcefully hitting what Doug Jones can DO for voters in the U.S. Senate–and not just negative attacks on Moore)–Jones would lose.
    I hope for the sake of Alabama voters, our perceptions of this state, and the work ahead for the U.S. Senate, that I am wrong. We have had enough of this.

  4. DB

    I guess he learn from Bill Clinton. I guess years ago the D ‘s were not that guy when Hillary went after all Bill’s accusers.
    And recently has Bill be hanging around with Harvey Weinstein. So are the D’s not that party? I am a indepedent, so I am disappointed in the D’s and the R’s. .

    • The Ghost of Elections Past

      Good point, disgusted. Right before the Nov 2016 presidential election, an acquaintance who had been a faithful Democrat voter for years, told me that he couldn’t vote for Hillary “because of all the murders.” All those incredible lies about the Clintons possibly had a greater impact than any actual defects that Hillary may actually have.

Related Posts

GET UPDATES

Get the latest posts from PoliticsNC delivered right to your inbox!

You have Successfully Subscribed!