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“The day before the Washington Post story came out, we were behind by one point, 46 to 45,” says Joe Trippi. “And the day before the election, we were ahead in our own survey by 2 points. We ended up winning by 1.8.”
This, Trippi says, was the reality of the Alabama Senate election. It was a dead heat when it started. It was a dead heat the day it ended. And a lot of what the media thinks they know about what happened in between is wrong.
Trippi, who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, was the chief media strategist on the Doug Jones campaign. And in this conversation, he tells the inside story of that effort. The sexual abuse allegations against Roy Moore, for instance, played a more complex role than many realize — the Jones campaign found that they often re-tribalized a race they were trying desperately to de-tribalize, and would occasionally boost Roy Moore’s numbers.
Trippi says the central insight of the Jones campaign was that many voters, including many Trump-friendly Republicans, are already exhausted by the chaos and hostility of Trump’s Washington, and they're open to alternatives. That was the opportunity Jones exploited, and it’s a lesson Trippi thinks is a model other Democrats could learn from in 2018.
You can listen to the full conversation with Trippi on my podcast, The Ezra Klein Show. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Ezra Klein
How did you first hear of Doug Jones?
Joe Trippi
A guy by the name of Giles Perkins — who's a wonderful Democrat down there, I'd worked with him in the past — he called me up and said there was a guy named Doug Jones he wanted me to meet.
Doug wanted to run. He thought somebody had to stand up and fight. But he didn't want to do a suicide mission. And so Giles and I, and another guy named Doug Turner, we sat down at dinner with him and had this long conversation about why it was possible. And he decided, "Let's do it."
Ezra Klein
This is before the Republican primary, before Roy Moore is the nominee. What is your argument to Jones for why it is possible?
Joe Trippi
I thought that Trump was actually driving people to want to end the chaos. Even if you liked him, you didn't want more chaos in Washington than what he was already creating. And so I thought if we could appeal to that in Alabama, that would get us close.
Turner and Giles agreed with that, but they also believed they could get a significant turnout, particularly in the African-American community, because of Doug's prosecuting the Klan. I mean, that he had a real attachment to the community and commitment to the community, and vice versa. And if we could pull those two things together, get enough Republicans to believe we’ve got to find common ground, and at the same time not have that message dampen the enthusiasm that was naturally there for a guy like Doug Jones, maybe we could pull it off.
Ezra Klein
So tell me where the election was, in your estimation, before the stories about Roy Moore’s predations.
Joe Trippi
Oh, we know [where the election was]. We know exactly. The day before the Washington Post story came out, we were behind by 1 point, 46 to 45. And the day before the election, we were ahead in our own survey by 2 points. We ended up winning by 1.8. So as far as we're concerned, all those other polls that were all over the place, showing 11-point and 8-point margins, we feel we were always on top of the pulse of what was happening, and it was a dead heat the day before the allegations came out.
The key to us having a chance was to detribalize the politics of the state. If Alabama was reacting to the tribal politics of our times, there was no way for us to win. And in a weird way, the allegations created tribalism again. You either believe the charges or you don't believe the charges. Suddenly, we're back into Republicans who don't believe the charges; it's the media out to get Roy Moore. He's able to start tribalizing the race. Trump begins coming in with him. And every time that happened, Roy Moore would open a lead.
Ezra Klein
So you're saying the allegations, in some ways, helped Moore in your polls.
Joe Trippi
In a weird way, yeah. A lot of what people didn't like about Moore was the fact that he'd been removed from office twice, the fact that he had started a religious charity and taken a million dollars from it after he'd told everybody he wasn't making any money on it. Those things were totally knocked off the charts by the allegations. And those other allegations, the other problems that people had with him, cut across party lines. If you take a million dollars and lie about it, there're plenty of Republicans who are scratching their heads.
But when it comes to the [sex] allegations, suddenly there's a fake yearbook. He's able to create all this doubt, push against the mainstream media. He's literally playing right into the Trump handbook.
And so what would happen is there would be these 3- or 4-point moves. We could be behind 45-44, or we'd be ahead 45-44, and then Trump would go out in the White House and say something like, "Roy Moore's who we need. We got to save the seat,” and then go trash Doug Jones as weak on crime, and Moore would move to, like, a 3- or 4-point lead for three or four days, and then it would drift right back to us.
The thing I still wonder about was when Trump went in on Friday, in Pensacola. Man, thank you for not going in Sunday. Because Friday night, Moore went ahead 4 points again; Saturday, it was 3 points; Sunday, it was 2 points. We're sitting there Monday night, going, "Can it keep drifting?" But Monday night, we were up by 2.
But the key to thinking about it, from our point of view, was, "Wait a minute. Four points? That's it? In Alabama?” Trump won by 28 points here 13 months ago! And all he’d do is move Roy Moore from 44 to 48, and we're still at 45, or maybe we drift down to 44. So that's it?
Ezra Klein
On net, did the allegations, and the focus on the allegations around Roy Moore's sexual predation, did that help or hurt Moore? The view a lot of people have is that absent those allegations, Doug Jones absolutely loses. Do you agree with that view?
Joe Trippi
No, not at all. We'll never know if we could've won without the allegations. But we had a dead heat before that, and it was all based on their understanding of who Roy Moore was. Alabama knew who he was. And Doug Jones was the guy who took on the Klan, and wanted justice for everybody, and wanted to find common ground. We were in a dead heat in Alabama the day before the Washington Post story. We ended up winning a dead heat in Alabama on election day.
The race was pretty defined by the time those allegations came out. I definitely think they hurt him. But what if we had we spent all those days talking about why he'd been removed from office, about some of the crazy things he'd said over time? I'm not saying we would've won that, but we had gotten to a dead heat long before those charges, and I think we would've had a dogfight the rest of the way, and I don't think the result would have been a whole lot different. I think we would've won or lost by 2 points.
Ezra Klein
One of the things that I found interesting about the campaign was a model that I've become used to for Democrats running in very conservative Southern states is for them to run on pretty conservative platforms. And Doug Jones didn't do that. He was very pro-choice in the campaign. He was against the Republican tax bill. He wasn’t particularly loud about his progressivism, but on the other hand, it wasn't a very moderated form of it either. Was that a choice?
Joe Trippi
Oh yeah. I mean, one thing, even at that dinner, was he didn't want to run by changing where he really stood on things. He's the kind of person that would go out and say, "We don't agree. Let me explain to you why I'm where I'm at, and why I think we should try to find a way for us to get to some middle ground on this." Now they could reject that. And Doug Jones was a realist. If that's why he got rejected, he could live with that.
I actually think we got a lot of people voting for us because people knew where he stood. They believed him. So then if he says he wants to reach common ground, then maybe he really does. I think there was an authenticity to him, and a credibility to him, that Moore didn't have.
What Doug Jones can teach Democrats in 2018
Ezra Klein
Are there lessons in Doug Jones’s race for Democrats in 2018? Or is an Alabama special election that includes Roy Moore and child molestation too hard to generalize from?
Joe Trippi
I think Trump, even with his own supporters who like him, has created enough hostility and chaos that voters don't want more of it. They can tolerate it with him, but they don't want more. I think there is an almost infinite hunger in the country right now for ending the division, the hatred, the hate talk.
Now, we had a primary, but it wasn't a fight. We didn't have to fend off a bunch of people who might've been out there saying, "Wait a minute, what are you doing?" when we begin talking about finding common ground with Republicans. We ran the Honor ad, which highlighted Gettysburg in the Civil War and the Battle of Little Round Top, and —
Ezra Klein
Can we talk about that ad for a minute? Because I think that ad is unusual. You have an ad that is about Gettysburg. In Alabama. And the point of that ad is that Doug Jones would like to go work with some Northerners on legislation.
What is the genesis of the idea, "Let's remind Alabamian voters of the Civil War,” and make it an argument for an Alabama Democrat compromising with legislators from Maine? I'd like to know about the thinking behind that ad.
Joe Trippi
We were trying to internalize what Doug Jones had been saying to us about why he was running. And it’s Giles Perkins, the chair of the campaign, and not a media guy, who came up with the real home-run line, which Doug had talked to him about earlier: "There's honor in compromise and civility."
And Doug didn't blink. It was why he was running. He saw what was happening, that we were sort of coming apart as a country right now, that our politics are falling apart, that people don't want to work together. Washington shouldn't be a battlefield.
Ezra Klein
So then let’s go back to the broader question for Democrats in 2018. You’re saying you’ll have Democrats running in contested primaries, and there’ll be those who have a very confrontational approach to Trump, and then there are going to be those who want to run a campaign that is more about turning the temperature down.
Joe Trippi
I think the big question mark in our heads as we were arguing for common ground was what do rank-and-file Democrats do when they see this? Do we somehow deenergize those people who really are appalled by what's going on with Trump? Again, we're monitoring everything, and what happened was Republican women started to move to us, younger Republicans started to move to us, and the intensity among Democrats didn't diminish; in fact, over time, it kept building and building.
So what I'm saying is in Alabama, we pulled that off. Trump's creating energy among the Democratic base that wants to come out and wants to make the change and wants to do something to fight back against what's happening. At the same time, he's creating enough chaos and divisiveness and hostility that Republicans who would never ordinarily vote for a Democrat say, "Okay, well I've got all the chaos and hostility I can handle right now. I'll vote for somebody who wants to try to find common ground and get things done for me, even if they're a Democrat." And trust me, a lot of people in Alabama had to do that.
That is, I think, a winning message in a lot of these swing districts. There aren't that many swing districts that are plus-28 Trump out there [author note: Trump’s Alabama margin in 2016].
Ezra Klein
My gut is that for Democrats, the winning message in 2020 is basically, "It doesn't have to feel like this." I think most people do not want politics to feel like this. They don't want it to take up this much space in their heads. They don't want it to feel as conflictual with their neighbors. The whole thing feels terrible. But I don't know that "It doesn't have to feel like this" has any chance of winning a Democratic primary at all.
Joe Trippi
We didn't have that problem because we didn't have a primary. But you're right. You just put your finger on why I think we won. They don't want to feel this way. And Roy Moore, they knew, was going to continue to make them feel this way. And they knew Doug Jones was not.
Ezra Klein
One of the things that was striking to me was that in 2012, young Alabamian voters went for Mitt Romney by 4 points. In the Jones election, they overwhelmingly went for Doug Jones. Even Romney by 4 is a pretty near vote for a Republican in Alabama. What do you think Alabama politics are like in 15 or 20 years as these generations change over?
Joe Trippi
You saw that coalition coming together for Doug Jones. It was African Americans, women, and people under 45. And you want to know how breathtaking that move is? Think about this. Barack Obama, nationwide, won under-45s, I think, by 14 points, 15 points. Hillary Clinton won them by 14. In Alabama, Doug Jones won them by 28 points. [Ralph] Northam had similar numbers in Virginia.
So yeah, that's a real problem for Republicans over the long term.
