Alabama Women ‘Make a Stand’ in First Election of the #MeToo Era

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BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For Janet Maycock, Tuesday’s election of the Democrat Doug Jones in Alabama was personal.

The allegations of sexual misconduct against teenage girls by Mr. Jones’s opponent, Roy S. Moore, the conservative former judge, had stoked Ms. Maycock’s own memories of being molested by an older employee in the restaurant where she worked when she was 17, and of feeling like she could never speak up about it.

“It made me more adamant to keep a man like that out of the Senate,” said Ms. Maycock, 67, who is black and was among numerous women celebrating at Mr. Jones’s victory party. She wanted, she said, “to make a stand for women who have the courage to speak out.”

Depending on one’s point of view, Tuesday’s election was a referendum on decency, a test of the credibility of the news media, or a rallying cry against outside interference in Alabama politics. But it was also the first election in the #MeToo era and a measure of the deep divide among women over personal issues like sexual harassment, religion and race.

Exit polls conducted by Edison Research for the National Election Pool suggested a majority of women, 57 percent, backed Mr. Jones, compared with 42 percent of men. But the polls also showed women as sharply divided by race, with about 98 percent of black women supporting Mr. Jones, mobilizing heavily to carry out a long tradition of supporting Democrats here.

Among white women, 34 percent supported Mr. Jones, according to the polls. In 2012, the last presidential election in which an exit poll was conducted in Alabama — which is not usually a battleground state — President Barack Obama won only 16 percent of white women.

Many of Mr. Moore’s supporters, like Deborah Webb, a white nurse from Centreville, Ala., dismissed the allegations against him up until the end, focusing instead on his religious credentials.

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“God, country, military, that’s what we love,” said Ms. Webb, 54, adding, “As a Christian, I want to vote for someone who has those values, someone who loves the Lord.”

Mr. Moore had the support of prominent female Republicans in the state, including Gov. Kay Ivey, who said she believed his accusers but would vote for him anyway, and Terry Lathan, the chairwoman of the Alabama Republican Party.

“Party identity is the key to the white vote” regardless of gender, said Natalie Davis, a professor emerita at Birmingham-Southern College.

And on Tuesday, many women cast a vote for the party, even if the allegations left them uneasy. “I wasn’t sure who to vote for, even though I’m a Republican,” said Brandy McDonald, 40, a hairstylist who is white, as she left a church polling place in Hoover. She said she had only made her final decision to vote for Mr. Moore that morning.

Still, women did provide Mr. Jones’s margin of victory. “There’s no doubt about that,” said David Wasserman, an editor for the Cook Political Report, adding that Mr. Jones’s victory was also driven by the high turnout among black voters of both genders and college-educated voters.

The rejection of Mr. Moore by women stretched well beyond major cities like Birmingham and Montgomery, coursing into places like Ozark, the seat of Dale County, in the heart of the Wiregrass region that is ordinarily a Republican stronghold.

There, Tanya Embry, 36, who is white, cast her ballot for Mr. Jones at a civic center in southeast Alabama. “I know this is typically a Republican state, but I can’t get behind somebody who is being accused of things like what he’s being accused of,” Ms. Embry said.

Seth C. McKee, an associate professor of political science at Texas Tech University who studies American elections, said the gap Tuesday among white men and women in Alabama was particularly noteworthy. “In the South, there usually isn’t any,” Mr. McKee said. In exit polls, nine percentage points separated white men, who went for Mr. Moore by 72 percent, and white women, who went for Mr. Moore by 63 percent, yet he had been banking on even more support from female voters.

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In Gadsden, Ala., where Mr. Moore was accused of making unwanted advances to women, Melissa Simmons, 32, and Donzella Williams, 40, stood outside a polling place hoping to make a last-minute pitch to voters. Both of them, who are black, said they were appalled by the allegations against Mr. Moore, and spoke of them in the context of raising their children: What sort of message would it carry, they said, to send that sort of man to the Senate?

“Guys are going to think they can do these kinds of things to women, and think, ‘We can get away with it,’” Ms. Williams said. “And Trump is basically telling Roy Moore, ‘It’s O.K., I did the same thing. You’ll get into office and you can push it under the rug.’”

Other women, like Ms. Maycock in Birmingham, who volunteered for Mr. Jones, went to the polls and voted for him with their own painful histories in mind. Casie Baker, 29, said she had been molested as a child, and understood why the allegations had taken so long to surface. “This is nothing against Roy Moore,” she said, “but I personally have dealt with being molested myself, and I know it can take a long time before you can say something.”

Still, after voting in Hoover, Madeleine Bell-Colpack, 19, who is white, took a moment to celebrate, stopping on the church steps to take a selfie in the cold night air. Her vote for Mr. Jones, she said, was a repudiation of a sexually aggressive culture reflected in the allegations against Mr. Moore.

“I’m from Alabama. The culture is rampant,” Ms. Bell-Colpack said. “That’s why this election was so important to me — we have to get away from that.”

Some women at Mr. Jones’s election night party in Birmingham, where campaign volunteers and devoted supporters cheered beneath confetti, were quick to caution that his victory was not won solely upon the allegations against Mr. Moore.

“In Alabama, we are looking at a bigger picture than what the nation was looking at,” said Sandra Chandler, 50, a black mother of three who said education was the driving issue for her.

Zarinah Shahid, 34, a project manager who lives in Birmingham and is black, said Mr. Jones’s victory nevertheless felt like a leap forward for women, and a culmination of a new burst of Democratic energy that emerged here after the election of President Trump last year.

“I thought about going to the Women’s March, and seeing where we’ve come from there,” Ms. Shahid said. “It means everything for us.”