Showing posts with label Doug Jones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doug Jones. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 02, 2018

Doug Jones hires African-American chief of staff

Sen.-elect Doug Jones (D-Ala.) has hired former transportation official and congressional aide Dana Gresham as his new chief of staff.

Jones will be the only Senate Democrat to have an African-American chief of staff once Gresham comes on board. Two Senate Republicans, Sens. Tim Scott of South Carolina and Jerry Moran of Kansas, have black chiefs of staff.

Gresham previously served as assistant secretary for government affairs at the Department of Transportation, and before that was chief of staff to then-Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.). A graduate of Georgetown University, Gresham is an Alabama native: A tweet Tuesday by Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) referred to him as "Birmingham's own stand out."

Jones has made hiring a diverse staff a priority since he staged an upset win over Republican Roy Moore in last month's special Senate election in Alabama.

[SOURCE: POLITICO]

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

African American Voters Made Doug Jones a U.S. Senator in Alabama

Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's the black vote flying in to Alabama to once again save Democrats and thwart the dastardly plans of Donald Trump and his minions. In plain English the black vote helped defeat Roy Moore and make Doug Jones a U.S. Senator.

Ahead of Alabama’s special Senate election, there was a clear narrative about the state’s black voters: They weren’t mobilizing.

Six of 10 black voters stopped by a New York Times reporter in a shopping center last week didn’t know an election was even going on, a result the reporter took to mean overall interest was low. The Washington Post determined that black voters weren’t “energized.” HuffPost concluded that black voters weren’t “inspired.”

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the AP, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election day defied the narrative, and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year elections and special elections. Precincts in the state’s “black belt,” the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, reported long lines throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the black belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

Exit polls showed that black voters overall made a big splash. The Washington Post’s exit polls indicated that black voters would make up 28 percent of the voters, greater than their 26 percent share of the population, which would be a dramatic turnaround from previous statewide special elections in the South, including a special election for the Sixth District in Georgia which saw black support for Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff dissipate on Election Day.

As Cook Political Report editor Dave Wasserman noted on Twitter, turnout was particularly high in the counties with the highest black populations. In Greene County, a small, 80-percent-black area that Martin Luther King, Jr., frequented in his Poor People’s Campaign, turnout reached 78 percent of 2016 turnout, an incredible mark given that special elections and midterms usually fall far short of general-election marks. Perry County, also an important mostly black site of voting-rights battles of old, turned out at 75 percent of 2016 levels. Dallas County, whose seat is the city of Selma, hit the 74 percent mark. And while the exact numbers aren’t in for all of the majority-black or heavily black counties, it appears black voters favored Jones at rates close to or above 90 percent.

Meanwhile, Moore’s support sagged in mostly white counties. The race was probably over for the former state chief justice when Cullman County, which is virtually all white and heavily supported Trump in 2016, only turned out at 56 percent of its 2016 levels. It really does seem that although many white voters weren’t convinced to vote for Jones, the allegations against Moore persuaded many of them to stay home.

These results demolish the pre-established media narrative about black voters in the state, and defy conventional wisdom. Black voters were informed and mobilized to go vote, and did so even in the face of significant barriers.

I previously noted that Alabama is one of the hardest states in the country to vote—especially so for black voters, and that voter suppression efforts could have had strong effects on black votes. Tuesday night’s returns are all the more remarkable because of the surge of turnout that appears to have taken place in spite of those very real barriers.

The grassroots organizing in black communities by groups like local NAACP chapters was more muscular than it had even been in the 2016 general election. In the lead-up to Tuesday’s contest, voting-rights groups registered people with felonies, targeted awareness campaigns at people who might not have had proper ID, and focused specifically on knocking down the structures in place that keep black voters away from the polls. Their efforts immediately become a case study in how to do so in a region that has, since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision curtailing the 1965 Voting Rights Act, become a bastion of new voter-suppression laws, including new voter-ID laws.

The prospects of those laws and efforts to circumvent them will be further tested in the 2018 elections. But, for now, Jones is the man in Alabama, and even as white voters by and large stuck with Moore, Democrats were saved by a community already fighting against the grain to be heard in the din of democracy.

Read more: African American Voters Made Doug Jones a U.S. Senator in Alabama

Saturday, December 09, 2017

Cory Booker : Will Senate pages be safe around Roy Moore?

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., went in on Alabama Senate hopeful Roy Moore on Saturday, wondering if Senate pages would be safe around the the Republican who is facing allegations that he pursued and sexually assaulted teenagers.

Read the statement he made on Twitter below:

Saturday, November 25, 2017

‘Doug Jones’s problem’: African American voters not energized by Alabama’s Senate race

The Ensley Park Recreation Center was beginning to come to life. The song “Happy” and other upbeat tunes boomed through the loudspeakers. And a crowd was gathering for a chance to glimpse something rarely seen in conservative Alabama: a surging Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate.

But Donald Williams was skeptical.

The 75-year-old retired UPS worker had come to cheer on Democrat Doug Jones in a campaign that has captured national attention. Has it also generated energy in Alabama’s African American communities?

“As of this day, I would say no,” said Williams, who is black. “And this is Doug Jones’s problem. He’s got to get out and get the voters energized.”

With two-and-a-half weeks left until Election Day, a once unthinkable victory in the heart of the Deep South is within Jones’s reach, thanks largely to a string of sexual misconduct allegations against Republican candidate Roy Moore.

Jones’s campaign believes he can win only if he pieces together an unusually delicate coalition built on intense support from core Democrats and some crossover votes from Republicans disgusted with Moore. Crucial to that formula is a massive mobilization of African Americans, who make up about a quarter of Alabama’s electorate and tend to vote heavily Democratic.

Yet, in interviews in recent days, African American elected officials, community leaders and voters expressed concern that the Jones campaign’s turnout plan was at risk of falling short.

“Right now, many African Americans do not know there is an election on December 12,” said state Sen. Hank Sanders (D), who is black and supports Jones.

The challenge for Jones is clear. According to Democrats working on the race, Jones, who is white, must secure more than 90 percent of the black vote while boosting black turnout to account for between 25 and 30 percent of the electorate — similar to the levels that turned out for Barack Obama, the country’s first black president.

As a result, Jones and his allies are waging an aggressive outreach campaign. It includes targeted radio and online advertisements, billboards and phone calls. Campaign aides are debating whether to ask former first lady Michelle Obama to record a phone message for black voters.

Read more: ‘Doug Jones’s problem’: African American voters not energized by Alabama’s Senate race