“I DIDN’T even come out of the closet as a Democrat until the primary,” says Molly Clark, a genial retired Presbyterian minister working to get out the vote for Doug Jones (pictured left), the Democrat in Alabama running for a Senate seat on December 12th. She still has not told people in her church. Such fears are not uncommon. One woman Ms Clark meets says she was scared of putting a Doug Jones sign in her yard on a quiet cul-de-sac in Calera, a small but growing exurb of Birmingham. “But people kept whispering, ‘I love your sign.’ They could see I’m just a normal mom, not a scary hippie.”
Alabama, like the rest of the Deep South, is solidly Republican: no Democrat has won a state-wide race in more than a decade. Last year Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there by 28 points. The Alabama Democratic Party is dysfunctional and deeply riven, its infrastructure almost non-existent. In the Senate race in 2014 Democrats did not even field a candidate; Jeff Sessions, now Mr Trump’s attorney-general, won with 97.3% of...Continue reading
Source: United States http://ift.tt/2kYIqRa
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