ABSTRACT
Alabama is a special place, full of special racists, who have spent decades making it all but impossible for people of color to cast ballots. As a result, Alabama is a very red state, where the conventional wisdom holds that it is impossible for a Democrat to win. The billboards were so plain, in fact, that a friend of mine working out in Alabama said that she thought they were government billboards, given how boring the design was. It only took her a few seconds, of course, to realize that the state of Alabama was advertising an election where a Democrat had a good chance of winning. A record-setting high of 41% of the voting-eligible population cast ballots in the 2017 Alabama Special Senate Election. Democratic candidate Doug Jones defeated Republican candidate Roy Moore by a margin of 21,924 votes, making Jones the first Democrat to win a US Senate seat in Alabama since 1992.
