Election Analysis – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

MOBILE, Ala. — Democrats all over the country are buoyed by a surge in voters in enough places to take back a majority in the U.S. House, inspired by what they see as a mortal threat to Democracy by the divisiveness of President Donald J. Trump. More than 110 million Americans cast a ballot on Election Day, more than ever before, for a national voter turnout of 47 percent. That’s the highest turnout for a midterm since 1966.

By Spider Martin

All over Alabama, however, Democrats and progressive independents who thought there might be a chance to move the political pendulum a tick or two away from old Southern racism, conservatism and religious fundamentalism came away sad and disappointed. Democrats also got disappointed in Florida, Texas and Tennessee too.

But nowhere was the Blue Wave stopped by a Red Wall more than in Alabama, where people thought they had actual momentum after boosting Democrat Doug Jones into the U.S. Senate last year over religious zealot Roy Moore, who epitomized the past.

In spite of all the hard work by Democrats here, especially in the progressive enclaves of Huntsville and Jefferson County, in race after race Democrats had their hats handed back to them.

Without a dynamic and well run campaign by the Democratic nominee for governor, lesser known Democrats down the ballot had no chance.

Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox ran a lackluster campaign that just never caught on, according to critics, with an old fashioned in-state political consulting company called The Matrix running his campaign.

Republican Kay Ivey won going away with nearly 60 percent of the vote. She got 1,019,558 people to either check the box by her name on the ballot or vote R for Republican. By contrast Maddox only got 691,671 votes, about 40 percent. Election analysis shows that 65 percent of the 1.7 million people who voted cast a straight party ticket. A large majority of those were Republican votes.

So in race after race, the Democrats lost, big.

Alabama Secretary of State Election Results

Now that it’s all over, engaged Democrats on social media are wondering what happened, and looking for who is to blame for the dismal results. It’s hard to credit Governor Ivey for running a great campaign, since she mostly hid out and refused to debate. Her campaign ran typical TV ads touting her conservatism, Christianity, opposition to abortion and gun control.

Less than a week after the election, news writers all over the state are not talking about how effective the Republican campaigns were, or even how bad the Democratic campaigns were conducted. In many cases, such as the race for the state House in Tuscaloosa between Democrat Will Benton — the challenger to incumbent Republican Rich Wingo in House District 62 — the Republican won by a landslide (68-32%) without having to spend much money or time campaigning at all, Benton said.

He experimented with Twitter groups and raised enough money to run Facebook ads, and still lost. Rather than gaining seats, the Democrats actually lost another five seats to Republicans.

Alabama Election Results

The problem seems to be the Alabama Democratic Party itself, which is being led (or not led) by Montgomery political pol Joe Reed, who learned to run a spoils system in the days of George Wallace.

Joe Reed

At 80, Reed still controls the state party executive committee with an iron fist, mostly installing his family members and other loyalists on the committee, like former Decatur teacher and Secretary of State Nancy Worley. In any other place in the country, Reed would be ousted for being guilty of nepotism. Not in Alabama, where it really is all about who you know and who you are related too.

Ms. Worley has been party chair since after Judge Mark Kennedy tried to work with Reed and failed right after Joe Turnham stepped down after the 2010 elections, in which the Republicans took total control of all three branches of government for the first time in more than 100 years.

One of the most liberal Democratic blogger columnists in the state recently produced a piece under the headline: Alabama Democrats’ party chair is really awful at her job. This is not from the tea party blog Yellowhammer. It’s the Birmingham News, Al dot com.

This is incredibly embarrassing, and in any other place it would have resulted in her immediate resignation. But instead of stepping down, Worley was caught on video by local TV news reporter Reshad Hudson with the CBS affiliate WKRG 42 calling her critics “naysayers” and “malcontents.” It sounded a little like something Trump might say.

We spoke with Alabama Democratic chairwoman Nancy Worley about yesterday's outcome for the party. #alpolitics pic.twitter.com/z5i1LHH0vq

— Reshad Hudson (@ReshadHudson) November 7, 2018

Then on Friday, in a sad piece of weak investigative journalism, the Montgomery Advertiser publicly aired the frustrations of a number of candidates who ran under the banner of the Democratic Party here, under the headline: Alabama Democratic Party sat on cash as Election Day approached.

The headline and the story are a bit misleading, since the party has so little money or expertise in raising money online that one might think from reading it that the party is rich and just didn’t do anything with the money to help its candidates. The report shows that the party had about $508,000 in one bank account and $284,000 in another and spent none of it on national, state or local campaigns “as the state Republican Party was pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into its campaigns.”

But anyone who has been following the travails of the party over the past eight years knows the party is still about $500,000 in debt from previous failures. So the party might as well have no money at all.

It has no one on the ground in Montgomery who knows how to raise money using the online methods that have now been perfected since Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 in no small measure by raising small donations from individuals using a vast email network and a web fund raising interface, as well as social media.

The money they raised did not come from newspaper, TV or Facebook ads either. It came in the old fashioned corrupt way, in the form of checks from Political Action Committees or PACs. It is impossible to know who actually contributed that money, because it is hidden from public view by crafty lawyers.

While the party didn’t spend one blue dime to help all the new candidates, including a number of women, instead it was extorting money out of Democratic candidates who wanted to be included on its “yellow sheet” of endorsements.

Letters from Joe Reed (see below) show he was demanding anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 and in some cases $25,000 in contributions from any candidate who wanted to be included on his advance ballot sent out to prospective African American voters. So instead of buying black votes for candidates, or busing people to the polls to vote, Reed was extorting money from Democrats to pay for his Alabama Democratic Conference.

Joe Reed Letter One

Joe Reed Letter Two

Where did the money go? Supposedly to something called GOTV, which does not stand for an alternative cable television news channel to counter Fox News, which may be something the Democrats might want to consider.

Instead, GoTV stands for Get Out The Vote, which is supposed to include a strategy to identify potential voters, help them get to the polls, to pay for people to stand outside polling places with signs for the candidates who buy in, maybe some door-to-door canvassing. Maybe they knocked up a few signs the old fashioned way, but that does not seem to have been much of a priority this time for Democrats.

During the Doug Jones campaign, there were so many signs all over the state — even in places you would not expect to see them where the vast majority of voters were Republicans — that every national news outlet that sent reporters to the state found it necessary to mention all the signs in their reporting.

During the 2018 midterm elections, it was nearly impossible to even find a mention of what was going on in Alabama in any national newspaper or magazine online, or on any national news channel on television.

It was like the Democrats were running a stealth campaign and the Republicans were simply hiding.

To offer a contrast to what the Democrats were able to do in a regular election year compared to what Doug Jones did in a special election, which is not even supposed to turn out voters or raise much money, Jones raised more than $22 million for his campaign, $10 million of that in the month before the election, much of it from Hollywood thanks to Twitter. The Senator is on record saying he got no help from the state party, and he tried to talk them into changing leadership recently, but was rebuffed.

Individual candidates in the Alabama midterms were pretty much left to their own devices they could afford, showing up to local meetings with other people who were already Democrats, maybe visiting a few churches, and trying to build organic campaigns using social media. Some raised a little money to buy ads on Facebook, but they mostly tried to target young people who, if they planned to vote at all, were probably going to vote for the Democrat or the woman anyway.

There was very little mass media outreach. The cash strapped local newspapers tried to cover some of the campaigns, without any expectation that anyone would buy an ad in the paper to help pay for the coverage.

This is no way to run a party or a democracy. But then, no one has ever accused Alabama of having a democracy. It was a one-party state built by George Wallace for a generation. Now it is a one-party Republican state built by conservative Christians who are not interested in making government work. They want a theocracy, and by god they vote.

If the progressives, or the socialist-Democrats, the mainstream Democrats — or simply average, normal, working Alabamians who just want the government to work — expect to bring about change in the old Heart of Dixie, at least these two things are going to be necessary.

Number one, a functioning state Democratic Party will have to be built from the ground up, the grassroots. What’s left of the old Democratic Party must be demolished, like an old, decrepit building that has to be torn down before a new one can be built in its place.

Number two, someone is going to have to help fund an effective information system to get real, factual information out to the mass public. One way or another, it is going to require an expansion of the old newspaper system of producing journalism online that can be picked up and broadcast on television and amplified on Facebook and Twitter.

The old news corporations and chains don’t seem to know how to compete with Facebook, so they have just caved in to using it the best they can. So mostly what you get is coverage of sensational crime, football — and cat pictures.

Two years ago, libertarian tech billionaire Robert Mercer handed $11 million to Steve Bannon of Breitbart News. He ramped up the right-wing news site and turned it into a fake news powerhouse, surpassing the traffic of the New York Times and almost catching up with Fox News just in time to help Donald Trump win the presidency.

What if New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg or California billionaire Tom Steyer were to put some of their money into helping to build state and local news outlets online like the Bloomberg wire service? Or let’s say the trial lawyers, unions and non-profit groups in Alabama would finally realize that there is more to activism than giving money to individual candidates and sharing mainstream news links on Facebook.

We might be able to build something resembling a democracy in Alabama one of these days. But not if we keep doing the same old things in the same old way.

—
You can participate in funding alternative news online with GoFundMe.