Impeachment Puts Sen. Doug Jones in a No-Win Situation in Alabama

Jones has recorded five-minute segments like these every morning since the trial began to try to answer why he is still undecided on a question that most Americans resolved long ago. “I caution everyone that we’re still in the early stages,” Jones, a former trial lawyer, said in another video. “We’ve got to hear the other side of the story.”

As the lone Democrat in the Senate representing the Deep South, a region that is solidly pro-Trump, Jones is in a precarious position. Political prudence demands that he take an exceedingly measured approach to his vote on whether to remove Trump from office. The senator has spent weeks pleading for open-mindedness, even going so far as to raise doubts about the Democrats’ case against the president, saying last month that “there are gaps.”

The challenge for Jones is whether voters see him as reasonable and unbiased, as he hopes, or as an appeaser of the other side. His appeals risk alienating not only the Trump-supporting Alabamians he has to answer to when he faces reelection in November, but also liberal Democrats — his base — some of whom he says have wanted to remove the president since “the minute he took his hand off the Bible when he was sworn in.”

In interviews with 20 Alabama voters over the past week, the senator’s contemplative approach seems to have persuaded very few. Approve or disapprove of Trump, they expressed the kind of certainty about impeachment that Jones will not give them.

Impeachment, Skeeter Diehl of Mobile said, “is a bunch of bull, the whole thing — just a bunch of noise.” As Diehl sat with friends for lunch at Noble South, a bistro downtown, she said Jones would be smart not to get crosswise with the president and his voters. And she predicted that if he wanted to save his seat, “he’s not going to step out there” and vote to remove Trump.

But Janelle Finley, a 32-year-old from Mobile who votes Democratic most of the time, was just as resolute in her support for impeachment. She said what mattered most to her when casting a vote was finding a politician whose “morals match mine,” and Trump’s decidedly did not. When she considered the case against the president, she saw something larger at risk than the possible loss a Democratic seat in the Senate.

“If Doug Jones goes one way because he thinks it will hurt him in November ...” Finley added, pausing to consider the possibility that he might vote not to convict because it could cost him the election. Then she shook her head incredulously. “After all this evidence?”

“This is an issue for all of us,” she continued. “And right now the world is watching and seeing how divided and broken we are.”

Jones’ predicament represents the flip side of the one facing vulnerable Republican senators in states with less political homogeneity, like Susan Collins of Maine and Cory Gardner of Colorado, where moderate voters might exact retribution for what they view as letting Trump off the hook.

In a brief interview last week, Jones said he felt the pressure of the impeachment trial every day. “I mean, this is not something that I bargained for when I ran for this office,” he said, adding that he could “really feel the weight of the oath of office and the Constitution on my shoulders.”

He has also called for hearing testimony from John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, after the revelation that a draft of Bolton’s forthcoming book claims that the president wanted to keep aid to Ukraine frozen until officials there helped him with investigations into Democratic rivals.

Alabama briefly broke a long cycle of Republican dominance in December 2017 when it elected Jones, the first time in 25 years that the state sent a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. At the time, many Democrats and progressive activists held up Jones’ victory as a template for how to be competitive in deeply conservative states.

But Jones capitalized on a unique set of circumstances: the outrage surrounding his opponent, Roy S. Moore, a Trump-endorsed former state judge who had been accused of forcing himself on teenage girls. Jones, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, turned out large numbers of black voters. And he benefited from the support of a smaller number of suburban white voters who were usually reliable Republicans.

He won the race by less than 21,000 votes, or 1.5 percentage points, with a boost from traditionally Republican areas like Mobile County, which he carried by 14 points. (In 2016, Trump won the county by 13 points.)

But an unusually high number of votes cast in the race were write-ins for candidates not on the ballot at all — nearly 23,000 — suggesting that while many Republicans had turned their backs on Moore, they could not bring themselves to vote for a Democrat.

“When you have Roy Moore and Doug Jones, for a lot of people it’s not ‘How do I vote?’ It’s ‘Do I even vote?’” said Josh Woods, 32, from Mobile.

Woods said he had written in the name of someone else instead of voting for either candidate. As for how he thought Jones would handle his vote on Trump’s impeachment trial, Woods said, “He’s well aware of his surroundings.”

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Woods said he did not see himself voting for Jones in November, given that Republicans were likely to nominate someone more mainstream than Moore.

Without disaffected Republicans to count on, Jones needs to turn out more Democrats than he did in 2017. But impeachment complicates the race for him either way, putting him in a no-win situation.

Karen Dias, a telecommunications executive in Mobile, sat inside a juice store the other day and said Trump’s election had left her deeply shaken. “I can’t even put into words how embarrassed I was,” she said.

If faced with a choice between two Senate candidates who voted to acquit Trump, she said forlornly, “What am I going to do?” before answering her own question: “I wouldn’t vote.” Noting that in her native country of Brazil people were punished for not voting, she said her conscience would lead her to exercise the freedom she did not have there.

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In Alabama, Trump’s approval ratings are consistently about 20 points higher than they are nationally, placing it with Wyoming and West Virginia as the states with the highest levels of support for the president.

Across much or rural America, the dynamic is similar: The roughly 60% of that population that approves of Trump is demographically distinct from the roughly 40% that doesn’t.

And in Alabama, political divisions are even more closely tethered to race than they are across the rest of the racially segmented South. According to election data analyzed by Seth C. McKee, a political scientist at Texas Tech University, a minuscule number of blacks in Alabama identify as Republicans — 0.4% — compared with 4.6% in the Deep South as a whole. By contrast, 70% of whites in Alabama are Republican or Republican-leaning.

In the 140-member state Legislature, the parties are split almost entirely along racial lines, with just two white Democrats remaining — one in the Senate and the other in the House of Representatives.

The Republican Party, McKee said, “has almost become a counterweight to the black vote in those states,” with many white voters having come to see it that way. “The Democratic Party,” he added, “is considered the black party.”

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On the campaign trail, partisan politics have been wedged into the larger debate over Southern identity. Arnold Mooney, a Republican running to challenge Jones in November, told a crowd in Huntsville last week that the senator was no Alabamian as far as he was concerned. “He doesn’t represent us, he doesn’t look like us, and he doesn’t even sound like us anymore,” Mooney said, drawing laughter from the crowd. (Jones does, in fact, still speak with a noticeable Southern drawl.)

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As Diehl sat in a group of a half-dozen women at lunch last week at the Noble South, the topic of impeachment elicited eye rolls and groans — all aimed at Democrats. One of the women, who typically votes Republican, said she had voted for Jones in the last election but would not do so again. A second, who did not vote for Jones, said she was not impressed by what she had seen from him so far. “All he did was fall in with Pelosi and Nadler and the rest,” she scoffed, referring to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York.

In fact, Jones voted with Alabama’s Republican senator, Richard Shelby, 69% of the time during his first year in office, according to a ProPublica analysis, but has more consistently opposed Republican policies since. He voted against a permanent ban on using federal funding to pay for abortions, for instance, and opposed Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

At a nearby table, Jan Herndon of Fair Hope said she believed both parties had drifted too far from the center.

“There’s nobody who’s middle of the road anymore — and I just want somebody middle of the road,” said Herndon, who did not vote for Moore or Jones last time. When she thought about what kind of politician fit her centrist criteria, Jones was not one — a sign that no matter how pragmatic he tries to sound on impeachment, many Alabama Republicans cannot get past the fact that he is a Democrat.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .