MIDLAND CITY, Ala. — Roy Moore rallied rural conservatives and Doug Jones made his closing argument to a diverse crowd in Birmingham as Alabama’s most unpredictable, volatile, and off-the-rails Senate race in memory shuddered to a close before Tuesday’s special election.
“It’s difficult to drain the swamp when you’re up to your neck in alligators, and that’s where we are,’’ Moore, who has been accused of sexual misconduct against teenage girls, said Monday night at an event in Alabama’s Wiregrass region, near the Florida border. “We’re up to the neck in people that don’t want change in Washington, D.C.’’
Along with the theatrics of the last day, the state, by turns energized and exhausted, faced a barrage of television ads, conflicting polls, presidential tweets, and last-minute pleas.
Alabama Secretary of State John H. Merrill said he expected a modest turnout of 20 to 25 percent — it was about 64 percent in the 2016 presidential election. Local officials have reported an unusually high number of requests for absentee ballots, but Democratic and Republican strategists said it was exceptionally difficult to predict who, exactly, would ultimately cast votes in a rare mid-December special election.
After dark, Moore rallied supporters in this rural area of southeast Alabama, a near-certain trove of Republican votes. Jones, who spent his weekend appearing with prominent black Democrats, including former governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, campaigned in Birmingham and Montgomery, to try to energize urban and African-American voters who would be central to a Democratic victory.
The former president and vice president, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, recorded robo-calls for Jones, while President Trump recorded an appeal for Moore.
Jones, a former US attorney who also needs support from independent and Republican voters if he is to win Tuesday, tried to balance his get-out-the-vote appeals to Democrats with outreach to people who ordinarily would not consider voting for a Democrat. Indeed, it seemed that his most powerful weapon was a Republican: Senator Richard C. Shelby, dean of the state’s congressional delegation, who has said he wrote in “a distinguished Republican’’ rather than vote for Moore.
“The people of the state, they have elected Richard Shelby for four decades,’’ Jones said of the senator. “They’re going to listen to Richard Shelby.’’
Jones also earned an implicit boost, of a sort, from Condoleezza Rice, the Republican former US secretary of state and an Alabama native. In a statement issued by her office Monday, Rice called on Alabamians to “reject bigotry, sexism and intolerance.’’
That Jones is even in a position to benefit from a make-or-break turnout effort is extraordinary by the standards of Alabama, where no Democrat has won an election for Senate or governor in almost 20 years.
A Fox News poll published Monday found Jones with a 10-point lead, but other recent surveys have found Moore ahead, and private Democratic polling shows a closer race than the Fox poll suggested.
Moore, who has denied allegations of sexual misconduct, has been a surprisingly rare sight in public as the campaign nears its end. But he reemerged at a chandelier-adorned, barnlike building here Monday night in his first public appearance since last Tuesday.
At a rally that featured three conservative firebrands — Stephen Bannon, former White House adviser; David Clarke, former sheriff of Milwaukee County, Wis.; and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas — Moore’s supporters urged voters to show up Tuesday.
“This comes down simply to who is going to work the hardest,’’ Bannon said at the rally, which, included the theme music to “Mission Impossible’’ and boos at the mention of Shelby.
Jones, speaking briefly at an event space attached to a vintage car showroom in Birmingham, flanked by basketball star Charles Barkley, called the vote a choice that would define Alabama’s identity.
“It is time that we put our decency, our state, before political party,’’ Jones said. Barkley was more blunt: “At some point, we’ve got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.’’
