As you say, incumbency doesn’t count for as much now as it once did. And that’s particularly true in Alabama, where there is a strong anti-establishment streak. A brief incumbency hurt Strange more than it helped.
This is the correct answer. He has much more value as a known, likable name from the South in a national race than as an extreme long-shot for one seat.
I saw one of those recently. He was eating at a Sambo’s with a saber-tooth tiger and a Great Auk. :dubious:
Shelby claimed that he voted against Moore by writing in an unspecified “distinguished Republican”, but did not vote for Jones.
While this may have been a viable path for Shelby and other conservative Democrats in the 1990s, I don’t see it happening today for a few reasons. First, if Jones wanted to run as a Republican, he could have just entered the Republican primary rather than handicapping himself by running as a pro-choice Democrat in the most reliably Republican state in the US - I think that his stated views as being pro-choice, pro-CHIP, and others probably state his legitimate policy views, and he’s just legitimately a Democrat, albeit probably a more conservative one than you’d find in some other states.
Second, if he did switch parties, both the Democrats and Republicans would view it as an enormous betrayal. Democrats for obvious reasons, Republicans because he would have just made them waste their money and look bad to knock off the choice of their own primary voters. He would never survive the next Republican primary and he’d have no support at all. So it would really make no sense for him to do this.
It makes sense to me that Shelby would want to deny how he voted but it was him saying this that is what mattered.
I don’t believe that any party would refuse to back a popular guy who if he fiips might save the Senate. I don’t recall flip disasters like this at the senate level. Who are some examples?
Also I said it gave him an easier path to reelection not that he’d particularly want to take that path.
The party might. I’m not sure the voters would be pleased. There was a quote in a book I just read, a military fantasy: “Love treachery. Hate traitors.”
If it’s a choice of taking the guy who flipped or losing the seat again, then sure, you back the guy who flipped. But if he flips and they reject him, they’d just replace him with another Republican. He’s expendable.
Short answer? Jones will probably get slaughtered next time out.
But there’s always a chance the GOP could nominate someone as awful as Moore (or even Moore HIMSELF again). So, we can’t be sure. A party dumb enough to nominate him once is dumb enough to do it again.
Flips are pretty rare. In the 21st century, Jim Jeffords of Vermont went R->D, as did Arlen Specter. Jeffords chose to retire rather than seek reelection, but would have been a favorite if he had decided to run. Specter attempted reelection and lost the Democratic primary. Then you have the cases of Joe Lieberman and Lisa Murkowski, who lost their respective primaries and ran successful independent/write in bids regardless (I’m not sure you count that as switching parties exactly.)
In any event, the recipe for surviving after a party switch seems to be 1) personal popularity and 2) that you’re responding to a shift in your base voters’ preferences. I don’t know if Doug Jones really has that much political mojo at the moment, after all he was basically just a prosecutor with some big wins in the past who’d been in private practice for a while. And frankly, his base is heavily, heavily, heavily African American and they’re sure as hell not following him to the GOP. He’s better off just voting his conscience, trying to respond as best he can to his constituents’ needs and hoping like hell Roy Moore wants a rematch in 2020.