On Tuesday, the people of Alabama will go to the polls and choose a replacement for the senate seat left vacant by beleaguered attorney general Jeff Sessions. For many Alabama voters, choosing a candidate will be a legitimately difficult decision. Thinking as a liberal, it easy for me to say, “Doug Jones is the most qualified, and there’s no competition”. But living in a rural area and talking to my conservative friends, I’m beginning to understand how they could vote for a man like Roy Moore. If you’re a Republican, and you believe that life begins at conception, then how could you possibly vote for a person who supports policies that you believe are tantamount to killing a child? If you believe that the Supreme Court needs conservative justices like Neil Gorsuch or Clarence Thomas, then how could you support a person who would oppose a Trump nominee? If you are a conservative, if you support President Trump, then how can you support a person who will oppose Trump’s agenda?

However, if the person on your side of the issues is an accused child molester, it’s easy to see why the polls are close.

I don’t have to rehash the things Roy Moore has said or the things he believes. Although, suggesting 9/11 was God’s divine punishment for America accepting homosexuality, saying that America was at it’s peak when there were slaves, or his seeming inability to respect the separation of church and state are worth mentioning.

There’s an ugly stigma about Alabama because of its checkered history, there’s an assumption that Alabama is backwards and bigoted. I’ve been to Alabama, and while most voters are unabashedly conservative, they’re still decent people who are aware of how outsiders view their state. A lot of people recoil when they hear “Alabama” and the people in that state have been trying to move past George Wallace and Jim Crow for a generation.

Roy Moore pulls Alabama backwards, and it may not matter how much voters agree with Moore on policy.

The truth is, and everyone has been acknowledging this, but we don’t really know what turnout is going to look like. However, the models that polls have put out that show Moore leading have two things in common, women don’t make up greater than 52% of respondents and blacks don’t make up greater than 25%.

On average, Alabama women make up 53% of the electorate. But it stands to reason that Roy Moore might energize women voters, and they could conceivably turnout so high that they could comprise 55% of the electorate. We know this could happen because it has happened, in Missouri way back in 2012 when Claire McCaskill trounced Todd “legitimate rape” Akin. There’s data already that suggests that Jones holds a sizable lead among women, so higher woman can only benefit Jones.

The real uncertainty comes from how many black voters will turn out for Jones. We know it won’t be the level Barack Obama received (Blacks made up over 35% of the electorate). However, it’s unlikely that black turnout will fall as low as the polls are predicting. Granted this is an off year special election which historically means black turnout shouldn’t be especially high. However, this race has received national attention and voters have been saturated by ads as well as robocalls from two former Presidents. Blacks might not show up with Presidential level turnout, but pollsters shouldn’t underestimate the power of community organizers in communities of color. That’s not to mention the mobilizing factor that is Roy Moore.

Ultimately though, I’m not a statistician or a pollster. When people start handicapping polls because of this factor or that factor, it means they’re losing. The Romney people did it in 2012 and the Bernie people did it in 2016. However, this race is legitimately close unlike the others.

Just finally, Alabama isn’t as red as we’d like to think. In 2010 during the Republican wave, a democrat received 48% of the vote in his race for lieutenant governor. Roy Moore only was just barely elected to the Supreme Court in 2012. Alabama voters are willing to split their ballots, and a Doug Jones victory should surprise no one.

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It should not surprise us that Judge Roy Moore supporters and others on the extreme right have taken to lambasting the Washington Post. When it comes to credible news outlets, to quote Jon Stewart, the Roy Moores of the world “got nothing.”

If you are a progressive, if you are a moderate, you have a wide range of local and national media outlets that present empirical evidence and provide skilled analysis. The Washington Post may now be the flagship publication because it has almost unlimited resources thanks to the ownership of Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame.

But obviously the New York Times, the Boston Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other newspapers and magazines are constantly providing credible journalism. When it comes to electronic media, there is PBS, NPR as well as CNN, MSNBC and CBS. Then there are the exclusively on-line newspapers such as the Huffington Post.

If you’re a Roy Moore supporter in Alabama, a follower of Steve Bannon and Breitbart, a member of the Tea Party, you have to feel that you are consistently being piled on by this national media.

Yes, this credible media makes mistakes, witness the writings of Judith Miller of the New York Times on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but by and large they apply the type of thinking reflective of the Enlightenment that has been a cornerstone of America democracy throughout its history.

It’s possible that if the Founding Fathers were still amongst us, one of their biggest disappointments would be the disdain that so many Americans have for using empirical evidence as the basis of reaching conclusions. Part of the dissonance between the Founding Fathers and those currently on the right wing is that the Fathers tended to be skeptical of literal interpretation of the Bible. To many on the right, a literal interpretation of the Bible (when convenient) provides a respite from the challenges of rational thinking.

If there are few in the land of Roy Moore who want to, or are capable of, providing rational analysis of contemporary events, then the people are truly at a loss. If it is more important to the people to believe that they are a persecuted minority, then what they might read in the Washington Post, etc.  just further reinforces their notion of being the little people who are kicked around.

What is interesting and equally sad is that many other minorities seem to be able to cut through the B.S., correctly identify their oppressors, and develop strategies to improve their situations. The civil right movement was based on a commitment to the values delineated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There was a minimal amount of “poor me” and a great deal more emphasis on self-improvement and building bridges with one-time and even current oppressors.

Irony of ironies may be that white Southerners who historically have berated and discriminated against African-Americans now see a landscape in which more and more African-Americans are reaching the American dream and thriving in an information society. At the same time, so many on the right, particularly those who are white, just seem flummoxed by the way the world operates. Their frustration leads to resentment towards the main branches of this information society including such credible media points as the Washington Post.

As upsetting as it can be to have one of our fifty states seriously considering sending the likes of Roy Moore to represent them in the United States Senate, it is also saddening. It is even understandable that those who are so left behind modern society would rather fight for non-separation of church and state, fight to protect a likely sexual abuser, fight for someone who seems incapable of trying to advance the economic and human rights interests of the people of Alabama, than to see Roy Moore as he is and cast him aside for someone more modern.

Reconstruction has had its successes, look at Atlanta. But there is still so far to go.

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