Can Democrats win in Alabama?

Yet well before Alabama voters go to the polls on Dec. 12, Democrats face a critical decision at a moment when all politics is national. Some in the party believe that they simply cannot write off the South if they expect to regain control of Congress — and that they will never recover here if they abandon high-quality candidates such as Mr. Jones.

But the Democratic brand has become so toxic in states such as Alabama that if the national party rallies behind Mr. Jones and turns his candidacy into a liberal cause célèbre, it could only doom him by pushing Republicans reluctant to support Mr. Moore back to their partisan corner…

But in the eyes of many Democrats, opposing Mr. Moore is as much a moral imperative as a political one. As Mr. Axelrod put it, Mr. Moore, who has a decades-long record of making incendiary comments about gays, African-Americans and Muslims, is so offensive to Democrats that it makes him “hard to ignore.”