Alabama Senate race wrapped up in struggles over state's history – and its future

It is one part spectacle, one part morality play, one part ideological battle – and one part a struggle to give a modern definition to the sole Southern state that has yet to shed the "problem child of the nation" description that three-quarters of a century ago was employed to describe the entire region.

There are enormous stakes in the Alabama Senate race between Republican Roy Moore, who has spent the past month fending off charges of sexual misconduct, and Democrat Doug Jones, who finds himself in the position of wooing suburban white Republican women in a state that provided Donald Trump with 63 per cent of the vote – the fifth-largest margin he won last year.

The Dec. 12 election will determine whether the Republicans' slim majority in the Senate will grow even narrower. But that may be the least of it. It will also send a message about the national preoccupation with sexual predators – Mr. Moore has denied all charges, and President Trump has offered his support – as well as alter generations-old voting patterns and signal the future of the two-party system in the Old Confederacy, where 18 of the 21 senators are Republicans.

Alabama – about the same land mass size as New York or Pennsylvania but stubbornly on the periphery of American life – has grown up since John Gunther, in his classic Inside U.S.A., employed that problem-child description for the South. Its college football teams, once derided for being composed solely of what legendary Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant used to call "little old skinny things" – which is to say Southern white boys – have had black players since Bryant recruited them in 1971 and now are regarded as national powers. Alabama's economy, still hostile to unions, is no longer powered only by low-wage, low-skill industries, and has welcomed plants for Mercedes Benz and Airbus (along with a fleet of Bombardier jets), while the I-85 highway corridor increasingly bears resemblance to North Carolina's high-tech Research Triangle.

And yet the folklore and decades-old heritage still have political power, and the Moore-Jones race reflects that folklore, that heritage – and the struggles that the other Southern states engaged in a more than a quarter-century ago. In his 1941 classic The Mind of the South, W.J. Cash described the South as "not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it." Today, Alabama remains not quite a nation within the South itself.

"Politics is all about perceptions, and the prevailing idea in Alabama is always that everybody has it in for us, everybody makes fun of us, everybody has contempt for us and everybody thinks that we are only about poverty, religion, corruption, and the idea that an Alabama virgin is a girl who can outrun her brother," said Wayne Flynt, an emeritus Auburn University historian and the editor of the Encyclopedia of Alabama. "But Trump's base is here, and Roy Moore is playing on that, picking up the state narrative that outsiders, including the media's reporting on the sex charges, are mounting yet another attack on Alabama values."

The contours and dynamics of this special election, prompted by the vacancy created when Mr. Trump appointed Senator Jeff Sessions his Attorney-General, are a reflection of Alabama's history and its continuing struggle over its future.

The great irony is that in the state that thrust Governor George Wallace to global attention in the 1960s – he was revered at home and reviled in the north for resisting the integration of the University of Alabama in a celebrated confrontation with the John F. Kennedy administration – this high-profile Senate race may depend on how many black Alabamans turn up to vote. The federal Voting Rights Act was prompted in large measure by the resistance of Alabama to permit black citizens to vote, and it was the great March, 1965, confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where black activists were attacked and beaten, that led to the passage of the landmark legislation.

Like so many Southern states that resented the Abraham Lincoln-era Republican push to ban slavery, followed by the Radical Republican congressional measures for post-Civil War Reconstruction, Alabama was a devoutly Democratic political redoubt for nearly a century. It was the decision of a Southern president, Lyndon Johnson, to embrace civil-rights legislation that prompted the onetime "Solid South" to turn from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.

This movement was accelerated when Richard Nixon, in his 1968 presidential campaign, adopted a "Southern Strategy" – conservatism combined with subtle racial themes – explicitly designed to attract onetime Confederate states to the GOP. In the past three presidential elections, every Southern state voted for the Republican candidate except Florida, which voted Democratic only once, and that was by less than nine-tenths of a per cent. Alabama voted for the Republican candidate for the past 10 consecutive elections.

The political and geographical divides in the state are largely a racial divide. Active black voters – 765,000 in all – are concentrated in the urban areas of Huntsville, Mobile, Montgomery and Birmingham, and in the coastal plain across the south-central part of the state known as the Black Belt, a reflection of its rich soil and the racial composition that prompted the growth of a conservative insurgency to stunt the power of black people and eventually to shut off their voting rights.

Today, the political prospects of Mr. Jones – who as a prosecutor won the convictions of two men responsible for the 1963 bombing of Birmingham's 16 th Street Baptist Church that was a cultural flashpoint – depend on whether black voters flock to the polls. That, along with how many suburban Republican women might turn against Mr. Moore, are the principal unknowns.

"This campaign is really about Roy Moore," said Glen Browder, a former moderate Democratic congressman who teaches at Jacksonville State University in the east-central Alabama. "He's unconventional, very much like Trump. If he's elected he'd be a Trump kind of senator, and if he does win, it'll be because people here would rather have a guy with his personal sexual scars than one who would contribute a Democratic vote on the social issues people here care about." Abortion, for example, is one of the key issues in this race.

There's one other factor: the education divide. (That also played to the advantage of Mr. Trump, who in February, 2016, examined the voting demographics of his primary-season supporters and proclaimed. "I love the poorly educated.") In Alabama, 71 per cent of Grade 4 students read below grade average. James (Big Jim) Folsom, who served eight years as governor in the late 1940s and 1950s, explained his 1948 election by saying that he won the vote of every Alabaman "who had less than $500 in the bank."

"The question here is how determined Alabama is to send the most embarrassing politicians possible to the national stage," said Howell Raines, an Alabama native and former executive editor of The New York Times. "This is the only state of the Confederacy not to have changed to the new politics of the South."

Indeed, Alabama is the only Southern state never to have elected a senator or governor in the modern style of Reubin Askew of Florida (1971-1979), or Jimmy Carter of Georgia (1971-1975), or Bill Clinton of Arkansas (1979-1981 and 1983-1992).

"Everybody else has elected progressive governors, but we had George Wallace," said Natalie Davis, a Birmingham-Southern College political scientist. "Wallace wouldn't raise taxes for education and economic development, which other Southern governors did to change their states. He kept the state focused on race."

The state's official motto is Audemus jura nostra defendere, or "We Dare Defend Our Rights," a notion with severe consequences during the Civil War and then during the states' rights period a century later. But as he revised his state encyclopedia to mark Alabama's 200th anniversary of statehood, approaching in 2019, Mr. Flynt said he could imagine a new motto: "Often Embarrassing but Never Boring."