BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Democrats would seem to have the perfect foil to President Donald Trump’s culture wars in Alabama Senate hopeful Doug Jones, a mild-mannered attorney who made his name prosecuting Ku Klux Klan members.

But the former U.S. attorney and civil rights advocate, whom Democrats now believe has an outside shot of upsetting firebrand Roy Moore in a Dec. 12 special election, is staying away from challenging the presidential attacks on professional athletes’ anthem protests and defense of Confederate monuments, which are designed to motivate Trump’s base.


His problem: Jones is going to need the state’s Democratic-leaning African American population to turn out for him, and taking on the president would likely be an attention-grabbing way of motivating them. But Jones is also likely to need a good deal of support from white suburban voters — including many who lean Republican in a state that supported Trump by 28 percentage points last year — to keep the race close. Two recent polls have the contest within single digits.

So Jones is betting that focusing on Moore’s own contentious past statements, rather than Trump’s jabs about the NFL, will be enough to energize the base voters he needs without alienating conservatives who are wary of Moore. The former judge was ousted twice as the Alabama Supreme Court's chief justice for refusing to comply with federal orders on hot-button social issues — and his provocations have gotten no less dramatic since then.

Jones “obviously has to put together a multiracial coalition — that’s imperative for a Democrat in the South. For a Democrat in Alabama, that can be a difficult needle to thread: to try and energize African-Americans who trend more progressive while holding onto enough white voters who are hesitant to vote for a Democrat,” warned Montgomery-based Democratic pollster Zac McCrary. “What’s different in this case is you have two accelerants: Donald Trump and Roy Moore.”

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Trump’s allies have been clear that they hope his recent tweets and statements about cultural touchstones function as jet fuel for his once-flagging base. And a number of Democrats who aren’t currently up for election were quick to denounce them.

But the national party has struggled to find a coherent message for its candidates as they weigh directly responding to Trump’s louder musings about both types of protest.

Jones, though, hasn’t directly taken the bait, largely ducking the football fight that a number of professional athletes and some lawmakers prominently embraced.

“For the rest of the week let’s focus on unity in sports rather than division. Support our wounded warriors competing in #InvictusGames2017,” he tweeted late last month, later adding, “I want to be crystal clear here, I support the right protest, & freedom of expression. #TakeAKnee focuses on inequality & injustice.”

And while Jones won his primary contest on the very day of Trump’s widely criticized news conference equating some white supremacists with protesters in the wake of the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, he one week later said he believes the future of Confederate statues should be left up to local governments.

It was hardly a full-throated condemnation of the push to keep Confederate statues up: Campaigning deep in the old Confederacy just days before a new Confederate statue went up in the state, Jones argued that the matter would soon be “an economic issue” — even while most Democrats treated it primarily as a cultural and historical one.

Still, people close to Jones insist he’s not trying to be too politically clever by half. they point to his support for abortion rights as evidence that he’s not willing to moderate his views to appease conservative Southern voters.

“He’s not a finger-in-the-wind type of guy: ‘This is what I need to do to win in a Southern race', or, ‘This is the playbook the consultants gave me,’” said Democratic National Committee associate chairman Jaime Harrison, the former South Carolina Democratic Party chief who’s visited Alabama to appear with Jones. “It’s almost like he’s not willing to engage in the debate.”

One of Jones’ first priorities has been widely introducing himself to Alabama’s large African-American population, including with endorsements and robocalls from national figures including Georgia Rep. John Lewis and Congressional Black Caucus chairman Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana congressman. Alabama Rep. Terri Sewell last month hosted him at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation conference, too.

But Jones has also been reaching beyond that base, including with a rally featuring former Vice President Joe Biden in Birmingham last week.

“I can count on two hands the number of people that I’ve campaigned for that have as much integrity, as much sense of duty, as Doug does,” the potential 2020 White House contender said of his friend to a largely white crowd of 1,100. “He will bring a sense of treating everybody — everybody, not a joke — everybody with dignity and respect."

Biden’s visit “is the first step for Democrats restoring their place, and really developing their message, among rural voters, white voters,” said state House of Representatives minority leader Anthony Daniels. The former vice president, he said, “brings about [an opportunity for] going back into rural Alabama.”

Jones’ message to these voters largely focused around the idea that Moore — who has said “homosexual conduct should be illegal" and called Native Americans and Asian-Americans "reds and yellows" — would embarrass them in Washington.

And his allies also hope that Moore’s history of racially tinged activities will further motivate black voters against him without the candidate needing to pick a fight with the president. Moore, after all, was front-and-center in a 2004 fight to keep segregationist language in the state constitution.

He has also said he doesn’t believe former President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

“There are some factors where the Jones campaign can really capture the natural Democratic energy against Trump with Moore as an accelerant, without getting too close to the line that has the potential to boomerang for white voters,” said McCrary.

