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Democrats Need High Black Turnout to Win in Alabama. Heres Why That May Not Happen.
DEC. 5, 2017 6:00 AM
For Democrat Doug Jones to win Alabama’s special Senate election next week, he will need overwhelming support from African American voters, the core Democratic constituency in the deeply conservative state. A decade ago, Jones could have relied on a number of black political organizations to mobilize African American voters. But these once-powerful groups have declined as the state has voted more and more Republican, and now they may be unable to push Jones over the finish line.
African Americans are key to any Democrat’s success in Alabama, where party identification breaks down along racial lines. They make up 27 percent of Alabama’s population but a far larger share of the state’s Democratic voters: CNN, which did not conduct exit polling in the state last year, found in 2012 that 95 percent of black Alabama voters had cast ballots for Barack Obama, versus 15 percent of white voters. In that race, African Americans made up 28 percent of the Alabama electorate, and pollsters believe Jones will need them to be at least a quarter of the electorate to have a chance at beating Republican Roy Moore on December 12.
Most recent polls in the state show Moore with a small lead over Jones, erasing the modest deficit he faced after multiple women came forward to share their stories of being pursued, molested, and assaulted by Moore when they were in high school and Moore was a district attorney. A Moore win with low African American turnout would shine a harsh light on the Alabama Democratic Party and the African American groups that failed to turn out the vote for Jones. Wayne Flynt, an Alabama historian and professor emeritus at Auburn University, calls the election “an incredible test case” for whether these organizations can still mobilize voters for the rare viable Democratic candidate. And if they can’t, he says, it might be time to replace or reinvent them.
The same goes for the state’s lackluster Democratic Party apparatus, says John Archibald, a columnist for the Birmingham News and AL.com. “It very well could be the nail in the coffin of the [Alabama] Democratic Party,” he says, “and a rebirth.”
African Americans are key to any Democrat’s success in Alabama, where party identification breaks down along racial lines. They make up 27 percent of Alabama’s population but a far larger share of the state’s Democratic voters: CNN, which did not conduct exit polling in the state last year, found in 2012 that 95 percent of black Alabama voters had cast ballots for Barack Obama, versus 15 percent of white voters. In that race, African Americans made up 28 percent of the Alabama electorate, and pollsters believe Jones will need them to be at least a quarter of the electorate to have a chance at beating Republican Roy Moore on December 12.
Most recent polls in the state show Moore with a small lead over Jones, erasing the modest deficit he faced after multiple women came forward to share their stories of being pursued, molested, and assaulted by Moore when they were in high school and Moore was a district attorney. A Moore win with low African American turnout would shine a harsh light on the Alabama Democratic Party and the African American groups that failed to turn out the vote for Jones. Wayne Flynt, an Alabama historian and professor emeritus at Auburn University, calls the election “an incredible test case” for whether these organizations can still mobilize voters for the rare viable Democratic candidate. And if they can’t, he says, it might be time to replace or reinvent them.
The same goes for the state’s lackluster Democratic Party apparatus, says John Archibald, a columnist for the Birmingham News and AL.com. “It very well could be the nail in the coffin of the [Alabama] Democratic Party,” he says, “and a rebirth.”
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/12/democrats-need-high-black-turnout-to-win-in-alabama-heres-why-that-may-not-happen/
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