Facebook Manipulation Had No Discernible Impact –

By Glynn Wilson –

MOBILE, Ala. — Birmingham Democrat Doug Jones had Alabama Republican Roy Moore beat in the U.S. Senate election last year before the Washington Post broke the sex scandal story on November 9, 2017.

Our definitive reporting on the campaign clearly shows that, and the story is now a key piece of a new chapter in a book about the campaign now available on Amazon Kindle.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

The Polls

Polls showed Jones pulling even with Moore and trending up with Moore trending down one week before the Washington Post story came out, and showed Moore pulling ahead by 5 points one week after the story was published and spread all over social media. The backlash against the Post and the Washington and New York elite was exploited by Steve Bannon of Breitbart News and Moore and helped rally the tea party and religious Republican base to Moore’s side.

The sensational clickbait news all started this week on Tuesday, when the Newhouse news blog out of Birmingham at Al.com ran a story claiming the Washington Post sex scandal story was the key event that led to Jones’ victory over Moore, forcing Senator Jones to deny it.

“A bombshell Washington Post story alleging Roy Moore’s inappropriate past behavior with teenage girls did not help Doug Jones pull off one of the biggest Alabama political upsets in recent memory, the senator said Tuesday,” according to Al.com.

“I don’t think it helped me,” Jones said during an interview, recalling the election on its first anniversary. “When that story broke, I didn’t think it would help me. I think the election became much more tribal at that point. People went into their corners and said it was fake news.”

Jones said his campaign attempted, in the weeks following the release of he Washington Post story, to focus on what he described as “kitchen table” issues such as rural health care and the economy.

“It was a difficult task for us to stay on that message, and stay in our lane the whole time,” Jones said.

Moore, in a statement to AL.com through his spokeswoman Hannah Ford, labeled Jones’s comments as “absolutely ridiculous.”

The Post story won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism, with the publication describing their work as “a single story that upended what was expected to be a predictable Senate race.”

But that’s not the case, as we demonstrate in our reporting, which was picked up by the New Yorker and other publications but so far ignored by the Washington Post and Al.com.

Joe Trippi, who worked on the Jones campaign as a national media specialist, said that polling from the day before the story broke showed a 1-percentage point difference between the two candidates.

While polling varied wildly throughout the final month of the campaign, Trippi said the Jones campaign had internal numbers showing a 2-percentage point lead for the Democrat on the eve of the election, which Jones won by 1.6 percent.

Before the Post story broke, “We felt we could win this without hoping some shoe would drop that would help us make this. The opposite turned out,” Trippi said. “When the shoe dropped on Roy Moore, it actually moved people to him and not away from him. They came back.”

The Post story did turn the race into a national phenomenon, making Jones and Moore famous on the late night talk shows and Twitter.

Voter Turnout

Jones, his pollster and those of us covering the campaign closely thought he could win the race with about a 30 percent turnout. Low voter turnout favored Moore. He won the Republican primary when only 18 percent of registered voters showed up to cast ballots. He won the Republican runoff against Luther Strange in September with only a 14 percent turnout.

The general election turnout ended up being 40 percent, when in the final week, Trump came to Pensacola to endorse Moore, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dispatched $50,000 from the Republican National Committee for a new TV ad for Moore, and Alabama Secretary of State John Merrell told Republicans they could vote R and not put a check mark by Moore’s name on the ballot.

Republicans may believe the sex scandal story was the main factor in an upset that sent the first Democrat from Alabama to Washington, D.C., to serve in the U.S. Senate in a quarter century. But there were plenty of other reasons many mainstream, average voters in Alabama were not ready to show up to vote for Moore, including his radical religious views on the separation of church and state, his racist and homophobic comments about minorities, immigrants, gays and lesbians and transgender people, and the perception that Moore had already been an embarrassment to the state who was bad for business, along with Republican Governor Robert Bentley who was removed from office in a sex scandal of his own.

Moore had been removed as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court twice, once for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the court building in Montgomery after being ordered to do so by a federal judge, and then for refusing to abide by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling making same sex marriage the law of the land, proving he was incapable of abiding by the law due to his radical religious views putting a god above the government in this democracy.

Some people credit Jones’ win to write-in votes and even Republican Senator Richard Shelby, who refused to endorse Moore and urged voters to write in the name of a “distinguished Republican.” Howell Raines of Alabama, the former New York Times Opinion section and executive editor wrote an opinion column in the Times crediting Shelby for playing a major role in Jones’ victory, although Raines was not closely keeping up with social media during the campaign.

New York Times coverage alone was not enough to see what was going on in the campaign, since they do not have a full-time staff in Alabama. If social media had an impact, it was all the positive news coverage of Jones and the negative coverage of Moore being shared all over Facebook and Twitter.

The Gadsden Mall story may have been the story that buried Moore in the end, since it made the “Late Night With Stephen Colbert Show” on CBS and the Jimmy Kimmel show on ABC and raised millions of dollars for Jones out of Hollywood and all over the country, which allowed him to blanket every television market in the state with television ads in the final weeks. Our coverage of Jones and Moore was also shared all over Facebook and Twitter, which is the new way to promote news about campaigns these days.

If that was not enough clickbait for the week, the Washington Post broke another story on Tuesday claiming a leading social media researcher whose firm wrote a major report on Russian disinformation for the Senate acknowledged that he engaged in misleading online tactics of his own during Alabama’s hotly contested special election last year.

The next day the New York Times ran a story saying that as Russia’s online election machinations came to light last year, “a group of Democratic tech experts decided to try out similarly deceptive tactics in the fiercely contested Alabama Senate race,” according to people familiar with the effort and a report on its results.

“The secret project, carried out on Facebook and Twitter, was likely too small to have a significant effect on the race, in which the Democratic candidate it was designed to help, Doug Jones, edged out the Republican, Roy S. Moore,” according to the Times reporting.

Jones Calls For Investigation

It didn’t take long before Jones was asked about the story by reporters in Washington, and he was forced to deny knowing anything about it.

Jones says he is “as outraged as everyone else” about the allegations.

Pushed into a corner by the press pack scurrying for news the week before Christmas, Jones called for a federal investigation into online tactics used in his Senate race last year that mimicked Russian election tactics.

Even though the effort was minor and was not used against him, according to Politico, Jones said he is “outraged” and that congressional hearings wouldn’t be enough: “It needs to not just be a congressional inquiry. People get called in front of Congress all the damn time. There needs to be a look to see if there were any laws that were broke.”

“What is obvious now is that we have focused so much on Russia that we haven’t focused on the fact that people in this country could take the same playbook and do the same damn thing,” Jones said. “I’d like to see the FEC and the Justice Department look at this and see if any laws are being violated or were violated. And if there were, do it. Go after them.”

Jones said he was under assault by thousands of bots during the campaign but didn’t realize that Morgan was using his race as a testing ground for Russian disinformation tactics, albeit on a smaller scale. Jones is up for reelection in 2020 and Republicans in the state are already gunning for him to try to take back that seat. Congressman Bradley Byrne has said he will run, and there has been speculation that Jeff Sessions might come back to run for his old seat after he was ousted by President Donald Trump as attorney general.

“I’m concerned it’s going to happen again to me, to my opponent, to my colleagues up here, to the people in the House, to the president, to the people who are going to run against the president,” Jones said. “This should not happen to anyone in this country. We have got to take steps to protect our electoral system.”

Our definitive reporting on the campaign clearly shows that Jones had Moore beat before the sex scandal story broke, and the story is now a key piece of a new chapter in a book about the campaign now available on Amazon Kindle.

—
For the full, real story on the campaign, read the new chapter in this book, which just came on Amazon Kindle today:

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

You too can get in on fighting fake news by funding real news by making your generous donation today here.