Flying Blind in Alabama

Next Tuesday, we’ll finally know whether Republican Roy Moore or Democrat Doug Jones will become the next Senator from Alabama.

But next Wednesday, there will still be so many questions about this race. How did voters respond to the credible allegations that Moore, while in his 30s, had improper sexual contact with teenage girls? Did Jones get more votes than a generic Democrat would have? If Jones’s platform was less liberal, would he have performed better? Did Moore’s prior unpopularity matter more or less than these new allegations?

I could go on, but the point is that there’s more to this race than who will simply win. And many of these other important questions revolve around whether Moore or Jones performed well compared to some baseline result. For example, if we want to know how poorly Moore performed compared to a generic Republican, we need to have a baseline for how well a generic Republican typically performs. Or if we believe that Jones would have performed better if he was less liberal, we need to get a ballpark for how well a more moderate Democrat might have performed in the state.

There are numerous questions along these lines and many different baselines that would help us answer them. But rather than attempt to exhaustively list all of them and do the appropriate calculations, I zoomed in on three different baselines that I think will help us think about whatever happens next week.

Baseline One: Generic Candidates in a Normal Year

I don’t think that Roy Moore is going to perform as well as a generic Republican senatorial or presidential candidate would. He has a lot of baggage (not limited to the revelations of the last month and a half), which might discourage some Republican voters from turning out or cause them to vote for Jones or a write-in candidate. But it’s still worth getting an estimate of how Republicans perform in a normal year so that we can compare Moore to that.