Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) — the improbable Democrat in Dixie — is already squirming and wiggling in his attempt to rationalize a vote to convict the president on impeachment in the Senate and keep his own Alabama seat there.

Jones, who won his seat in the fall of 2017 when the GOP primary winner, Judge Roy Moore, was deemed too extreme even for the deep-red voters of ‘Bama, knows full well that a guilty vote dooms him in the Cotton State.

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Related: How Doug Jones Shocked Alabama Republicans

But a vote to acquit President Donald Trump makes Jones persona non grata with his fellow Dems in the Senate.

His only hope is that he gets a quiet waiver from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to vote to acquit if the whole Dem strategy seems to be going down in flames at the end of the process.

However, this is the beginning of the process — and Jones is covering himself with double talk and political pieties, in this analyst’s view, to leave his options open.

He told fellow Dems, this time barely masked as journalists, on Sunday on “This Week” on ABC, “Everyone wants to talk about this in the political terms and the political consequences term. This is a much more serious matter than that.”

And see the below tweet:

“This has to do,” he added on Sunday, “with the future of the presidency and how we want our presidents to conduct themselves. It has all to do with the future of the Senate and how the Senate should handle impeachment and articles of impeachment that come over. That’s how I’m looking at this.”

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Related: GOP and Dems Each Eye Key Senators for Their Impeachment Vote

The senator has a glaring, yet clearly befuddled, command of the obvious.

Jones will likely continue his little dance until the vote itself.

This analyst thinks that unless the Dems have totally lost their minds — which is always a distinct possibility — Jones will get that waiver to vote to acquit and lose anyway in very conservative Alabama in November of 2020.

That is, of course unless, as in 2017, the GOP snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.