“A Republican candidate, an accused sexual predator of teenage girls, is favored to win a Senate seat in a solidly Republican state against a former Democratic state prosecutor” sounds like a headline from a dark comedy, not a real life drama in Alabama last month. Two years ago, just the insinuation that a 35 year old man had been dating 14 year old girls, no matter how far in the past, would have disqualified him as a candidate for serious consideration to run in a primary, let alone win. And support from a party national committee let alone the president would have been unthinkable. It is sobering that this is our present. Ah what blindness hath partisanship wrought.
The victory of Doug Jones, the Democrat, in Alabama last Wednesday was greeted with big, big, bigly rejoicing. Even 45 called Jones to congratulate him, play acting at a nod to bipartisanship. On the other hand, Roy Moore still refused to concede 2 days after the count was complete, still praying to God for his infinite wisdom. I guess God feels that she will send Moore to that special place in Hell at a later date.
The victory of a Democrat in Alabama is a tremendous feat. The last Democratic Senator switched from being a Republican when he ran for reelection; he was a late comer to the GOP headlock on the former Confederate states, still smarting from demands for African American civil rights that the states continue to circumvent.
Doug Jones’ victory is testimony to why disenfranchisement is so important to Dixiecrats: Black voters can make a difference in governance. It has been the fear of white southerners since Reconstruction collapsed under the sweetheart deal that won Rutherford B Hayes the presidency in exchange for withdrawal of federal troops from the South to enforce the law. The Southern states promised to protect the Negro in lieu of federal troops, which nightriders interpreted as license to commit genocide through homicide and lynching designed to re-enforce the Jim Crow police state without interference from state authorities. It was that very power of the Black vote that made a difference in Alabama this month.
African Americans make up 26% of Alabama’s population but outside of urban areas, voter turnout is often light. There is the psychological factor. In a state as politically red as the blood spilt by our forebears, the feeling that casting a vote in statewide and national contests is like pissing into the Gulf of Mexico is often overwhelming. We wanted to cast our votes for the first African American candidate for the presidency; it was an historic opportunity. But Black Alabamians knew that their votes, much like my Georgia vote, would disappear in the electoral college count that ushered Barack Obama the White House. Still, we wanted bragging rights.
And there is the poverty. Alabama is the fourth poorest state in the country, with 19% of its residents living with incomes at or below the federal poverty threshold. One UN official has cited the state as the worst poverty in the developed world. The disparities are even more impressive. The percentage living in poverty in Wilcox County, the poorest county in the country in 2014 is 50.8% for African Americans, who are a much larger proportion of the residents, than whites with 8.8%. Similarly, in Lowndes county where the poverty rate of 4.1% is the lowest in the state, it is almost 35% for African Americans. This is, of course, the legacy of slavery and sharecropping, where whites have owned the land for generations and there are very few jobs that pay a living wage. The level of poverty insures poor funding for school systems which translates to a low skilled workforce. A poor unskilled workforce with little infrastructure offers little to attract new businesses, large or small.
In rural Alabama counties, poverty becomes an additional obstacle to voting.
In rural Alabama counties, poverty becomes an additional obstacle to voting; a vehicle and fuel are required to both register and get to the polls and many residents lack both. But more than that, research shows that people affected by a sense of deprivation actually think differently. The brain literally develops tunnel vision focusing on the thing, like money or food or time, it lacks. For example, lots of people can recall beginning a diet that restricts a food group like pasta/white flour or fat and then fantasizing about the very foods now forbidden. While the brain’s energy is hyper-focused, attention to other thoughts wanes, the ability to concentrate falters and unfortunately decision making follows. The energy required to be a well-informed voter as well as obstacles like distance and transportation lowers voter turnout among the poor. As Bernie Sanders was fond of saying, “poor people don’t vote.”
Alabama state governments have fought hard to pile on more obstructions to African American voting. Enter the latest device: voter ID to prevent voter fraud. We have all heard the Republican myth of voter fraud to support a campaign across all our states to suppress voting among groups considered traditional Democratic supporters while in reality it is almost nonexistent. The party has widely distributed a template for voter ID legislation to state legislators. In Alabama, efforts at disenfranchisement have been so aggressive since the Supreme Court overturned the Voting Rights Act that legal challenges have spurred the courts to step in to force state officials to dialed them back. After instituting the photo ID law, the state closed the DMV offices in the predominantly African American rural counties in the Black belt; the ensuing lawsuit forced them to reopen some offices. Alabama officials are often forthright about their attitudes toward “nigras”; one openly admitted that the voter ID law was designed to undermine the state’s “Black power structure.”
Disenfranchisement of former prisoners is another plank in the ongoing campaign. Alabama has the third highest rate of incarceration in the country, 634 per 100,000 individuals, which means a significant number of African Americans are either on probation or former prisoners. Recent legal action has forced the state to define which crimes disqualify convicts who have served their sentences from voting, but much confusion remains among polling officials and workers.
In a country where the hallmark of citizenship is the right to vote, the Alabama secretary of state, John Merrill, has said that “you’re going to have to show some initiative to become a registered voter in this state,” a statement antithetical to encouraging good citizenship and a far cry from automatic voter registration when driver’s licenses or IDs are issued that would enhance voter participation in our electoral process. That viewpoint flows from the knowledge that there are and have always been, more registered Democrats than Republicans in the US. The GOP wins when fewer people vote, thus the party’s decades long efforts to disenfranchise and suppress voting among the Democratic base. Because less than 50% of eligible voters turnout in most presidential years and 20-40% at the state and local level, elections are not won by the majority of voters. In most elections, who enters the voting booth is more important than how many.
Merrill pulled as many pitfalls out of his kit bag as he could muster. One of his early dirty tricks to cull voter rolls involved a sleight of hand postcard gambit. The state sent postcards that could not be forwarded to every voter containing their registration information. Voters were instructed to keep the card if the information was correct, but if it was inaccurate, the card should be returned to sender. A second card that could be forwarded was sent to every person whose first card was returned to the post office as undeliverable, asking the voter to update their information. Voters who did not return the second card were placed on the inactive list; they could still cast a ballot on election day but they had to re-identify themselves and update their information at the polls. Inactive voters would be purged from the rolls if they didn’t vote for four years. This scheme would appear to be a violation of the National Voter Registration Act, which forbids inactivating a voter who did not respond to either postcard if neither was returned to sender by the post office.
Voters who did nothing with the first postcard as instructed, in theory, remain active. However, at the polls, NAACP monitors received multiple complaints from voters who kept the first card, but were moved to the inactive list despite the fact that they voted in 2016 and had lived at the same address for years. Still they should have been able to vote by re-identifying themselves at the polls; instead they were required to fill out a complex form that included their county of birth. Some poll workers in their confusion gave these voters provisional ballots, even after they completed all the additional paperwork. Provisional ballots require a plea to a probate officer to have it counted. Some poll workers turned people away if they couldn’t name the county of their birth. Little by little, state officials were whittling down the number of voters that many volunteers had worked so hard to get to the polls. Without an unlikely state investigation, there is no way to know how many votes were lost to Doug Jones through this hanky-panky at the polls.
Building on historical precedents, police played a prominent role in discouraging voters on election day. Officers entered polling places in predominantly Black precincts to announce they were checking voters for outstanding warrants. One woman observed police stopping voters for illegal turns outside the polling places.
Merrell continued to insist that voter turnout would be low and understaffed polling sites, especially precincts serving African Americans, causing long lines when none existed in wealthier white districts. The confusion over unnecessary, redundant paperwork surrounding the postcard returns further slowed the voting process and extended lines. Some precincts ran out of ballots.
Alabama has not overlooked gerrymandering either. Republican’s best efforts were undercut by lawsuits filed by the Legislative Black Caucus after a ruling that 12 of 36 disputed districts were illegally drawn, preventing the new maps from being used in this election. No doubt, they are already being reworked in preparation for 2018.
Black Alabamians, who have long believed that their votes didn’t matter were rallied by cadres of hard working volunteers drawn from a coalition of churches, fraternities, sororities, grass roots activists, the NAACP and historically Black colleges who worked for months making sure voters were registered and obtained IDs. They were later joined by Democratic party workers and together they produced an even higher turnout of African American voters than in 2008, almost 30% of ballot casters. A phenomenal 98% of Black women and 96% of Black voters overall casts their ballots for Doug Jones.
The get-out-the-vote campaign began long before national attention became laser focused on the primary race as a pawn in the dystopian battle between Steve Bannon and the “Republican establishment” and long before the news of the saga of a 30ish Judge Moore using the town shopping mall and high school football stadium as stomping grounds to fill out his dating roster. As the reaction to the news and the drama built, the reasons to vote for Doug Jones became even more compelling, because the Alabama Senator would either be a pedophile or not.
Roy Moore’s position extolling slavery as the glory days for the country pretty much summarized for Black Americans where he was coming from; his Hispanophobia embodied in “build the wall” and Muslimophobia charted where he planned to go. Before that, as a federal judge, he placed his own beliefs above the law of the land and the Constitution which he had sworn to uphold; Moore strutted around stages with a pistol and cowboy hat swearing his commitment to do the same going forward. After declaring his loyalty to Trump’s reverse Robin Hood schemes to rob the poor to plump up the rich, he was unlikely to represent the interests of poor Alabamians, particularly minorities. Beyond his offensive political ideas was his reprehensible behavior toward teenage girls, telling one victim that he was a district attorney and she was just a kid, who would believe her.
Roy Moore, the candidate, kicked a hole in the seemingly impenetrable wall of Alabama Republican solidarity because he didn’t have Trump’s bombast and stock of media distractions to overcome his bad character. That hole was just large enough to enhance the impact of the African American vote. Lousy candidates typically lose elections unless they are incumbents. Even before Moore’s misconduct was exposed, his electoral victories for judge were close and he lost other elections. The last minute suggestion to add a write in candidate to the ballot proved icing on the cake; 1.4% of ballots cast were for write-in candidates and that is approximately the margin of victory for Mr Jones. On the other hand, Doug Jones might have had a larger victory were it not for the panoplay of voter suppression efforts.
While 68% of the white electorate chose Moore, white voter turnout was depressed in working class districts, much lower than turnout in 2014; in some counties, over 50% lower. On the other hand, better educated white counties saw an increased turnout over that of 2014 and a portion of those voters from Republican counties went for Jones. Trump’s popularity in exit polls found that 49% of voters think 45 is doing a good job. That is an astonishing turn in a deep red state; clearly a different electorate showed up last week than in 2016. This may be a reflection of Republicans who stayed away from the voting booth rather than cast a ballot for Moore; some because they could not vote for a pro choice candidate like Jones, or for any Democrat at all.
Twitter blew up with thanks to Black voters, which is a refreshingly rare acknowledgement for members of a community that often feels its powerlessness more heavily than its potential influence. But Democrats should not lapse into a belief that this election is an indication of the party’s change in circumstance, despite the cautious optimism of the press. The party seems focused on chasing the “white working class” vote that drank the MakeAmericaWhite kool aid. And suburban whites who took a sip too. Democrats think they have the Black vote in their pocket because the choice has been confined to the Democrat or a candidate who quietly or loudly was prejudiced against minorities. Sometimes both candidates are. But the party can’t hold onto our votes if it doesn’t improve our lives. Voter suppression efforts to disenfranchise Hispanics, students, former prisoners and young people as well as African Americans would be a good place to start.
The Dealmaker in Chief has deep financial entanglements with alleged Russian oligarchs and mobsters. He has been linked to at least 10 wealthy Soviet businessmen with alleged ties to criminal organizations or money laundering. Often, the full dimensions of relationships are difficult to trace through the shadow trusts and shell corporations. For instance, in the Trump SoHo Hotel in NYC, a twice convicted felon was a member of the firm that developed the hotel and scouted for Trump investments in Russia. Trump has testified in court depositions that he barely ever met him and that he never worked for the Trump organization. And yet, his business card carried the Trump logo and title of organization representative. One of his felonies was for stabbing a man, the other a conviction for stock manipulation and a money laundering scheme in NY state. Another SoHo investor was accused of a $55 million money-laundering scheme. A former major of Kazakhstan was accused in a federal lawsuit in 2014 of hiding millions of dollars looted from his city, some of which was spent on three Trump SoHo units. Three other Trump condo owners in Florida and Manhattan were accused in federal indictments of belonging to a Russian-American organized crime group and working for a major international crime boss based in Russia. The Ukrainian owner of 2 Florida condos was indicted in a money-laundering scheme involving a former prime minister of Ukraine. 
There’s no point in thinking about what the Trumpophants think; they are tethered to their leader with an umbilical cord not unlike the fetus on the verge of achieving personhood in the tax reform bill (who knew that religious fantasies stimulate the economy, but in this case, it will be through the proposed deduction for 529 school savings accounts for the fetus.) The real question is how will the other 60% of the populace respond. 
Thinking through all that brought me back to my own disillusionment with electoral politics in general. Amid all the talk about rigged elections, the primary fix was never identified: money. Thanks to 
On the national level, the House and Senate ferociously debated the issues of the day with insults and sometimes physical attacks. One Senator was beaten to death on the Senate floor. While dueling was illegal, numerous politicians participated in them to settle insults, including Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. Many of the political machinations at the national level centered on the political ambitions of Henry Clay and John Calhoun, both of whom felt it was their destiny to become president. It was Calhoun’s bitterness that he was never nominated that spurred his Nullification Doctrine, the precursor philosophical underpinning of the Southern secession movement that culminated in the Civil War. In the Senate, Calhoun injected the threat that the nullification doctrine would lead to secession into almost every dispute. Contrary to General Kelley’s recent revision of history claiming the Civil War represented a failure to compromise, the legislature for two decades debated and created compromise after compromise to balance the interest of the slaveholding south with northern interests. It is eminently clear that without having to use a retrospectoscope of today’s values, there were plenty of people who opposed slavery at the time, squelching Kelley’s argument that Robert E Lee was an honorable man who made a choice of allegiance to his state over allegiance to his country. It was as wrong then as it is now. 
oleblacklady 