Anecdotal Evidence Points to Heavy Alabama Turnout

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To paraphrase Alabama journalist and author Rick Bragg, soon it will be all over but the countin.’

The end comes in a matter of hours in an expensive, hotly contested special election to finish the last two Senate terms of former Sen. Jeff Sessions. He stepped down to become attorney general in the Trump administration.

Early polling place reports suggest turnout might exceed the 20 percent to 25 prediction of Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill for the contest that pits Republican Roy Moore against Democrat Doug Jones.

“We’re doing better than that in Baldwin,” Baldwin County Probate Judge Tim Russell, the top elections official in the county outside Mobile, told LifeZette. “I think we’re going to hit 35 or 40 [percent] … We’ve had good turnout in every precinct. I’ve been some big ones. I’ve been to some small ones.”

That would double the turnout for the primary in August.

Russell thinks Jones might take 45 percent of the vote in the county, which would be a stunning result for a Democrat in that GOP stronghold.

“I’ve never seen in my home county a race that had so much emotion on both sides,” he said

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A combination of highly energized opposition Democrats and a flawed, controversial Republican candidate transformed Alabama into a battleground state — at least for this contest. Moore, whose opposition to the federal judiciary led to his ouster from active service during two separate stints as Alabama Supreme Court justice, has underperformed other Republicans in previous elections.

Despite the baggage, most experts still considered Moore the favorite against Democrat Doug Jones, until The Washington Post a little more than a month ago published a story quoting a woman accusing him of making a sexual advance toward her in the 1970s — when she was 14 and he was 32. Three other women said Moore showed a romantic interest in them during the same time period when they were barely older than the legal age of consent.

Later, other women came forward to accuse Moore of acting inappropriately toward them.

“I’ve never voted for Roy Moore. But I’m voting for him today … Mine is kind of a protest vote against the media and the way it covered this.”

Moore has denied all the allegations, but they clearly reshaped this race. Most recent polls heading into election day put Moore in the lead, but a Fox News survey released Monday suggested Jones had a lead of 10 percentage points.

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