Jones' win in Alabama: a win for party and politics

Tuesday night’s victory by Doug Jones over Roy Moore in the Alabama special election to fill Jeff Sessions seat, when he became U.S. Attorney General, is one for the record books: the first time in 25 years that a Democrat has been elected from this true red state.

With a reliably conservative base, and an equally reliably electorate, Moore should have won, and handily defeated the 63 year old, former U.S. judge, but the inversion of popular wisdom, favored Jones with his slim record of mostly practical legislation.

This win has given new life to Democrats who now face future Senate legislation with a renewed vigor, but also a pathway for the midterm elections in 2018, and maybe, to recapture the White House in 2020.

With the onslaught of women standing up to, and outing, their sexual predators, and the near decapitation of such mega celebrities such as Charlie Rose, Harvey Weinstein, and even the venerable, and avuncular, Garrison Keillor, the time came when even, the South, as in capital letters, synonymous with political conservatism, draws a line against electing officials accused of sex with underage girls, as also did GOP establishment figures such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who wanted to ensure that Moore did not win.

McConnell was not alone, standing by him was a cluster of other Republican leaders, and lawmakers, who cringed at the idea of serving alongside of a man who autographed Bibles, said homosexuality should be punishable by law, and that Muslims should not be allowed to serve in Congress.

“Even Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.), who switched to the Republican Party in 1994 after winning reelection to the Senate as a Democrat,” opposed Moore. “He says he wrote in the name of a conservative Republican,” according to the Hill.

While Moore stood under the klieg lights of scandal, Jones created, and crafted, a strong and well-founded campaign that focused on his base, and then some.

Zac McCrary, an Alabama-based Democratic pollster, credited Jones with doing the leg work to make sure he took advantage of an energy among Democrats that has been evident in special elections across the country since Trump won the presidency. And, to no one’s surprise is that the Democrats will use the win and that of Virginia as a new chapter in political science.

“The Jones' campaign built a real infrastructure and funded it,” McCrary said. “So they poured gasoline on the fire that was already going,” reported NBC News.

One group of voters that was deeply affected were women, as  “He became the latest focal point in a long-running war between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and former White House strategist Steve Bannon, who has made a mission out of toppling sitting senators in primaries and trying to oust McConnell from his job.”

Payback comes in many forms, and just as success has many fathers, failure is an orphan, and Bannon now stands as the reason the seat was lost, say GOP leaders.

Jones’ focus on women was a smart move, but even smarter was his focus on creating a “coalition [that]  was built on women, African-Americans, college graduates and younger voters — many of them in and around the metropolitan centers of Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery and Mobile. Black voters accounted for 28 percent of the electorate, a slightly higher figure than their share of the population.”

As NPR reported, “Jones also made important inroads with the white vote. In 2012, Mitt Romney won white, college-educated women in Alabama by 55 points; this week, Moore won them by only 11, according to the exits.

Overall, Jones got 30 percent of the white vote. In the Deep South, that's the holy grail for Democrats and really hard to achieve. (In 2012, Barack Obama got just 15 percent of the white vote in Alabama.)”

The key to the Jones success was African American voters, who while only 25 percent of the state’s population, gave the push that mattered. And,, of this the core was the Black female vote, that pushed Moore off the stage on election night.

The turnout among Black voters was 96 percent, and that included 98 percent of Black women, prompting DNC Chair Tom Perez to say, “Black women led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic party,” and furthermore, “We can’t take that for granted.”

As Charles Barkley, former NBA star, remarked, “Democrats, and I told Mr. Jones this, and I love Doug, they've taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time. It's time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black voters and people who are poor. They've always had our votes and they've abused our votes and this is a wake up call for Democrats to do better for black people and poor white people.”

Twitter lit up and noted that all of the efforts to suppress the Black vote - id requests, inadequately staffed polls, etc  - all came to naught.

Jones also captured something stronger: the hearts of minds of that population: “One of his African-American supporters, Mae Stevenson, told NPR's Russell Lewis Tuesday night that Jones was "somebody who really and truly had a heart for the black people." She cited his prosecution while U.S. attorney of two Ku Klux Klan members for the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, in which four African-American girls were killed.”

If that alone was not enough, that prosecutorial legacy for that heinous act that is a nearly iconic representation of America’s struggle for civil rights, Jones listened to Black Alabamians who feared a return to the old ways of Jim Crow South, as they see the deleterious changes that the Trump administration has done.

Helping to forge the fear was Moore himself who said, in response to a query at a rally by a Black man that he felt that even under slavery, families in the South were better.

Barkley called Bannon a white supremacist and said Moore should have been disqualified for his alignment with the former White House strategist for President Trump.

Taking it further, “Jones cast the election as an opportunity for Alabama voters to reject the embarrassment he said Moore was sure to bring the state. And campaigned “with civil rights icon and Georgia Rep. John Lewis, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and other black leaders,” said CNN.

“While African-Americans make up roughly a quarter of Alabama’s population, years of dismal Democratic returns have left his party without much of a ground game,” to counter that aspect, “Jones’s campaign has furiously fought to find every vote, making 1.2 million phone calls and knocking on more than 300,000 doors, according to the campaign.”

Campaigning is one thing and governing is another, and while Jones won’t begin until January, If the past is any indication, then he will focus on education, job training, and energy.

Another legislative concern for him is health care, and to note he supports Obamacare, but not single payer care..

Despite Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s earnest wish to hold off on tax reform until he can vote, the hard and fast of Jones’ character, and record, seems to indicate someone that will focus on “bread and butter” issues, and as Barkley, said, for poor whites and blacks to get at least a lion’s share of attention.