A man holds a sign of support at a campaign rally for Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in Midland City, Ala., on Dec. 11, 2017. (REUTERS/Carlo Allegri)
Updated
Alabama voters declared Tuesday, by 1.5-percentage-point margin, that Republican Roy Moore isn't the man to represent them on the national stage.
Moore, a former state judge, lost a special election Tuesday against Democrat Doug Jones for the Senate seat previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Before the election, writers and sources from within Alabama fretted that Moore's controversial statements and alleged sexual misconduct would damage the reputation of a state that had been written off as a backwater by many Americans.
My more-talented colleagues Robert Costa and Michael Scherer called the election “a referendum on the state’s identity.”
“Supporters of Jones say with concern that a win Tuesday by the firebrand Moore would derail the state’s efforts to escape its painful history and rebrand as a forward-thinking place welcoming to Fortune 500 companies and a highly educated workforce,” they write.
Another piece, from the New York Times, laid out the Alabama is last in the nation but for Mississippi meme.
Now that voters have repudiated Moore's vision of the state, we're asking: what is the reality behind the state's tattered image?
We rounded up some of the most commonly mentioned stereotypes and threw them up against the data to see what stuck.
The obvious questions
Of the myriad ways in which Roy Moore could be said to be playing to the crudest Northern caricatures of Alabama and its neighbors, one has risen atop this news cycle like none other. Alabama spent generations struggling to shed a reputation as a land of teenage brides and shotgun weddings, but Moore’s alleged sexual misconduct with women as young as 14 have brought it rolling back.
It's a shame for the good people of Alabama, because it’s not particularly true. Underage men and women are still more likely to marry in Alabama than they are in the country at large, but the state (highlighted by the black line in the chart below) actually ranks above most of its Southern peers (the pink dots) in that department. The other labels are tiny, but they exist so that dedicated/bored readers can pinpoint each state.
The other big, gnarly aspect of Alabama’s legacy that Moore has dredged up is the issue of race, slavery and systemic discrimination. He has made comments that can be construed as viewing the antebellum South as a happier place, and used offensive terms for Asians and Native Americans. It’s hard to verify Moore’s personal attitudes toward people of color or to find data that offer irrefutable proof of racism (the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate map is one good option) but you can start by looking for effects of entrenched and systemic discrimination, such as the ratio of black income to white income.
In Alabama, the median white household earns about 58 percent as much as the median black household. That puts it toward the middle of the pack. Like most other measures, it's complicated by geography and demography, but in general it shows the gap isn’t as pronounced in southern states as it is in the Midwest.
Onstage, Moore clung to a few props — is he a caricature of an Alabamian or representative?
For every Deep South stereotype that has been thrust upon Moore based on his speech and actions there’s another that he’s embraced with open arms.
Roy Moore arrived on horseback to vote in Gallant, Ala., on Dec. 12, 2017. (DAN ANDERSON/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)
Moore and the Republicans made guns an issue in the race. He drew a handgun out of his pocket at a political rally, to pick just one example. President Trump said Moore’s opponent was "bad" on guns — that is, that he supports gun control. And it was probably smart politics for Moore and his supporters to focus on the issue, despite the election's ultimate result.
For better or worse, Alabama has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the country. Almost half of adults reported owning guns in a 2013 survey. On that account at least, Moore represented Alabama.
The same goes for religion, which is as much a part of Moore's public persona as his cowboy hat. A 2014 survey found Alabama tied with neighbor-to-the-north Tennessee for the second-highest rate of regular church attendance in the country, with more than half reporting that they went at least once a week. As you might expect, Alabama has the lowest rate in the country of people who seldom or never go to church — just 16 percent.
Low income isn’t offset by low expenses
Boosters point to thriving cities such as Birmingham, but the truth is that Alabamians as a group are more impoverished than most Americans. Poverty there is such that on a visit related to a U.N. investigation on extreme poverty in the developed world, Newsweek found some neighborhoods in Butler County are drained by open sewers. The investigation was triggered in part by a recent discovery that hookworm, long thought to be eradicated from the United States, still lurks in rural Alabama. The state ranks sixth in the nation when it comes to the share of people living in poverty.
And Alabama ranks even lower on the most common measure of median household income — fourth from the bottom.
As many folks will tell you, those numbers aren’t adjusted for the state’s low cost of living. Alabama is one of the 10 cheapest states to live. They’re right, to a point. Adjust the numbers for cost of living and Alabama bounces up from the fourth lowest-earning state in the union to the 14th.
The state’s relatively low income range may also help push it toward the middle in measures of income inequality. The top 5 percent of the population don’t take as much of Alabama’s total income as they do in neighboring states such as Florida, Georgia and Tennessee.
Alabama's relatively poor, but does that mean the uglier stereotypes apply?
Many of the most uncharitable images of Alabama surfacing in the context of this election grow from the state’s low income and resulting low standard of living. The men and women tasked with trying to sell the state to the world like to point to its more-educated workforce and success in attracting a number of international manufacturing heavyweights. But Alabama still remains near the bottom in most measures of education.
That doesn't mean Alabama is still stuck in a farming and timber-dependent economy. Agriculture and other resource-dependent activities account for a relatively small slice of employment.
This low standard of living does, however, manifest itself in some ways that do indeed fit the usual stereotypes. Alabama is in sixth place when it comes to mobile homes as a percentage of housing stock.
Alabama and its southern neighbors haven’t been hit as hard by the opioid epidemic as states to its north. But its inclusion among voters’ concerns in the Senate race suggest the issue is gaining importance.
In another major public health issue, Alabama doesn't fare as well. It has one of the highest obesity rates in the nation, Research has found a strong relationship between poverty, obesity and diabetes in the United States.
Roy Moore’s Alabama was a problematic place. The worst stereotype he represented, that of a relaxed attitude toward child marriage, isn’t borne out by data. But in his devotion to God and guns, the numbers indicate he was actually something of an archetype for his state. More than that, however, the focus on culture is a distraction from Alabamians' desire to shift the conversation about their state towards business.
Residents have long labored to convince the rest of the country their state is the perfect place to invest. To them, Alabama’s lagging economic indicators are a sign of potential to surge forward, not a sign of a place that has been left behind. By rejecting Moore's backward-looking candidacy, they made it possible for outsiders to focus on the state's future, not its past.