Emerge Alabama/Pat
October 18, 2018
Alabama voters head to the polls in less than three weeks. They’ll pick a governor, members of the cabinet, and a lot of state house and senate seats. One thing that may stick out on the ballot is that many of the candidates are women. Glamour Magazine published an article on the eighteen African-American Alabama women running in the midterms. APR’s Pat Duggins reports on the campaigns of another twenty three female candidates on the ballot in Alabama which are being fueled by a statewide initiative…
"Welcome to picnic..."
It’s Labor Day at the headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers in Birmingham. A picnic has been set up with an inflatable water slide for the kids, hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill, and another holiday staple…
“Hi, I’m Jenn…”
Yes, we mean politics. Candidates for circuit judge and county sheriff are pressing the flesh. That includes Jenn Gray…
“I’m just me, that’s all I know how to be… She’s running for Alabama State House District forty five “So, I just go out and I say what I’m thinking about and what’s on my mind…” Gray is running against Republican Dickie Drake. APR made two calls to Drake’s office for an interview. Those calls went unanswered. As for Jenn Gray, she’s a Democrat and a woman running in a state that votes mostly Republican and more often than not for male candidates. Gray agrees with some counts that put the legislature at eight five percent men.
“Aboslutely…yeah.”
And that’s why she’s running. And her message to the guys currently holding office in Montgomery is that Alabama needs more of a woman’s perspective…
“I know you think you’re doing things the right way, but that’s because you don’t know about these other things. You would change your minds if you knew people thought about it differently.” For example. Gray championed the idea of using campaign funding to pay for child care… “If you’re a single parent, if you’re a woman that is responsible for that child care. I can’t leave my child in the car watching Youtube videos while I go in and talk to a mayor.” Gray says that idea left many men in Alabama Government scratching their heads. That could be one of the reasons getting women like Gray to run for office has been tricky…
Stacie—“You know you ask a man to run, and he says ‘sure! I know I’m qualified! I’m sure I am!’
That’s Stacie Probst. She’s with the newly formed group Emerge Alabama…
“A woman…needs a little encouragement. She already has about twenty five jobs…usually unpaid or underpaid, and now on top of that you want to layer on public service.”
A phone call was made to national group called Emerge America to set up a branch in Alabama to cultivate female progressive candidates like Jenn Gray. It wasn’t easy. “The first phone call…they were saying ‘we’re not ready to expand into the south…the Deep South.” Which makes sense in red Alabama. But, then there was a follow-up call … “…and said ‘no, no…we’ve changed our minds. We want to go full force on a fifty state strategy.”
Class fx up
And that phone call led to this…
Jenn Gray and about a dozen other female candidates, all enlisted by Emerge Alabama, are getting a refresher course on how to run a political campaign. Instructor Kayla Sloan is using a PowerPoint presentation on things like how to get volunteers, how to conduct polls, and so on… Propst says the point is to get past the red state and blue state mentality, any focusing on the basics… “Look at who votes. Look who doesn’t vote. Look who’s not registered. Study your communities. And, then get out there and talk to people. It’s not that complicated.” Emerge Alabama wants to turn female voters toward more progressive candidates. There are estimates that fifty one percent of Alabama’s voters are women. One event in December of last year proved how potent that voting block can be…
(Doug Jones rally FX up...)
Stacie Probst says when Democrat Doug Jones beat Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate, a lot of the people working for the campaign and a lot of the people who voted for him were women. Probst says her goal is to keep that going… “I have lots and lots of women friends, who say they’re Republican…but, they’re not… And, Probst want to flip those GOP voters… “If you have five seconds with them to talk about the issues, turns out they care about exactly the same thing that all our candidates care about. Families, health care, good jobs, good education. They want all the same things all women want.”
“Should we really say…well, Alabama’s going to turn Blue anytime soon…probably not.” Dr. Regina Wagner is an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama. Her skepticism is fueled by her research which focuses on women in politics. “So, I think you have some room to win sort of the squishy center. But, there is a limit to that, because there are some people that’s a line for them they’re not going to cross. And some of them are women, so I don’t think you can win them over these women, but there are some women to can win over.”
Milam in
Back at class, Heather Milam speaks up. She’s running for Secretary of State. She recalls a situation while campaigning door to door for Democrat Doug Jones’ run for the U.S. Senate, it turns out turning GOP women can get dicey. One reason was their GOP husbands “ten percent of the homes, men answered the door and wouldn’t Emerge Alabama has twenty three women on the ballot office this year.
So, once Election Day is over, what represents success to Stacie Probst? She puts it this way… “I want every woman and every little girl to be seeing this.
‘Look at those candidates…they look like me!’ I want to run for office in the future.How do I get there? How do I plan for that?”
Sizzle, sizzle
Back at the electrician union picnic, the hamburgers are just about done… Jenn Gray up But Jenn Gray isn’t. She continues shaking hands and making small talk with voters knowing that she’s made a bit headway already. Remember her point about using campaign dollars for child care? Earlier this year, the Alabama Ethics Commission voted to allow that. It’s not a victory at the ballot box, but a woman’s perspective did win the day on that one issue…
Ten Commandments/Ingold Feature
Alabama has a long and complicated history with the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament of the Bible. This election day, voters will decide if that relationship will continue as is. A-P-R’s Stan Ingold has more on the ballot item known as amendment one…
(Sound from the movie)
When actor Charleton Heston delivered the Ten Commandments in the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille movie classic, his Moses didn’t seem interested in politics. Two thousand years later, here in Alabama, things are different… “I’ve been working on this off and on for about 14 years. I’ve passed it a number of times out of the legislature in the Senate, but it would die in the House.” That is state senator Gerald Dial. He is the author of Senate Bill 181 that eventually became Amendment One on the upcoming ballot. This will allow the display of the Ten Commandments in a constitutional manner on public property. It’s just the latest legislative attempt to do so. Dial says the political climate is better… “We’ve had a dynamic shift in the makeup of the legislature, both the house and the senate. The majority of Republicans in the house and the senate, so we just felt like we were very fortunate.”
I spoke with Dial as he was cleaning out his office in the state house after thirty five years in the Alabama senate. Dial says some goodwill from his colleagues may have helped overcome concerns about and legislating religion. “As you know this is my last term in the senate. I kindly leaned on them and said “Hey I won’t be back, let’s do this.” I may have gotten a few sympathy votes to make this a priority, not that the bill isn’t a priority but sympathy that “hey we need to pass senator Dial’s bill, it’s his last time and he’d like to do this and he’s been persistent on this.”
This constitutional amendment could cause some problems. That’s the view of Randall Marshall. He’s the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama. Marshall says some people may not fully understand the amendment… “I think the effect of this amendment is actually going to be to invite litigation against schools districts that post the ten commandments standing alone thinking they are allowed to do so.” Marshalls adds this amendment doesn’t do anything new… “There is a provision in there though that says “provided they’re posted in a constitutional manner” therein lies the run because the amendment doesn’t provide anything that’s not already lawful. If a school can post the Ten Commandments in a constitutional manner there’s nothing to prevent it from doing so now.”
However, Senator Dial disagrees. “It would give those officials in charge of that building the opportunity if they desire, to put the Ten Commandments and not worry about being sued as an individual. If it’s in our constitution they’re following the laws of the state of Alabama, then if you’ve got problems with the Ten Commandments being in the city hall, then you’ve got to sue the state of Alabama to change the constitution. So it relieves that legal responsibility from those who want to put the Ten Commandments in.”
Marshall says that is not the case… “That’s clearly wrong. From a legal stand point and I am a lawyer, he’s just flat wrong. There would be no obligation to sue the state and in fact, you don’t have a cause of action against the state, you have a cause of action against the school district that’s operating in an unconstitutional manner.”
These fights can get expensive, costing hundreds of thousands up into the millions of dollars in legal fees. Senator Dial says there is a provision that prohibits the use of public funds to defend the constitutionality of this amendment… “We’ve had outside sources not only from in state, out of state who have stepped up and volunteered and said “we will hire the attorneys and we will pay their costs and we will take it through the process.” So we will leave that up to those organizations and I feel certain they are more than willing to do that.”
Marshall has doubts about that too… “What the senator is missing, is that no outside organization is going to come in and say “not only will we defend you, but we will pay the other side’s attorney’s fees if we lose. There’s no organization out there that will do that, that is why a school district would still be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Someone who’s spent a lot of time on the losing end of fights over the Ten Commandments in Alabama is former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore… “Well, I displayed them in the supreme court in 2001, I believe it was and by 2003 there had been a complaint filed with the federal district court which ordered the ten commandments removed and I refused to remove them and for that I was basically removed from office by the judicial inquiry commission, not by the federal court but by the judicial inquiry commission.” An Alabama ethics panel kicked Roy Moore out as chief justice in 2003 for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the lobby of the state judicial building… “It was a legal fight. Most people think it was just a religious fight. It was about the acknowledgement of God it wasn’t about the display of the Ten Commandments that was made clear by the federal district court. It said the question was “can the state acknowledge God?” and he said “No.” and I submit to you “the state DOES acknowledge God in many ways, in law.” Moore says the state’s relationship with the Ten Commandments is complicated… “I’ve been a longtime supporter of the ten commandments. As you know there is a history of displaying the Ten Commandments in the supreme court of Alabama, which by the way, they’re still displayed there, only in a different form. They’re displayed in a historical context. After I was removed from office for displaying the Ten Commandments, they put them in the capitol.”
Now it is up to the voters to decide the fate of Amendment One. If it does pass one of the key factors is to remember that the Ten Commandments, if posted, must be done in a constitutional manner. Randall Marshall thinks many people may not understand that… “I think it’s inevitable, I would hope before either a school district or some other government entity does it that they get good counsel. Because, the clearest violation that’s going to get one of those entities in trouble would be to all by itself put up the Ten Commandments.”
For APR News, I’m Stan Ingold, in Montgomery…
Party Politics Feature / AuBuchon
The midterm elections are tomorrow, but political observers will likely tell you that many of the races were really decided back in June, during the party primaries. Alabama is one of the reddest states in the country – Republicans currently hold every statewide elected position and supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature. But what does party affiliation and identity really mean in Alabama – and how does the party structure work? APR’s Alex AuBuchon has more.
[FX Up: Homecoming ambience / football broadcast]
The two-party structure in American politics lends itself to a lot of tidy analogies, like for example, a football game.
[FX: Eli Gold – “Touchdown Alabama” – duck back to homecoming sound]
I’m outside Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa, Alabama for the homecoming game between the Crimson Tide and the Missouri Tigers. As tens of thousands of fans waited to head in to cheer on their team, I asked who they’d be supporting—not between the Tide and the Tigers—but the Republicans and Democrats in November.
“I am a Republican, and I will vote straight Republican.” Pam Fitch of Auburn, Alabama knows how she’s voting--others, not so much: “Well, party-wise, I’m a Republican. But political ideology – I think it kind of ranges to both. I think the political parties are shifting.” That’s Joe Wheeler of Tuscaloosa and as for Niya Miller of Hoover “Party affiliation is not very important to me, but ideology is. What the candidates are saying, or not saying.”
These somewhat squishy answers on political leanings might have something to do with the unusual way political parties work in Alabama. “Alabama is a no-party-registration state. That’s Political commentator Steve Flowers… When you register to vote in most states, you register as either a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent. Alabama is a no-party state. No registration. Which means you can be a Republican today and a Democrat tomorrow.”
But more practically, it could just about be called a one-party state. “There are 29 elected statewide officials in Alabama – now, granted, 12 of them are judicial posts – but all 29 elected statewide officials are Republican.” Terri Lathan is the head of Alabama’s Republican Party. She explains what exactly her organization does. “We wear many hats, to tell you the truth. We have a real strong infrastructure. We have a very powerful GOP database with our voters in it, and that gives us a lot of information. We share this information with our candidates, which in turn helps their campaigns. We also push out the content and the messaging of the platform of the Republican Party. So if you mix all that up, we are very, very busy people in this state.”
One would expect the state party on the Democratic side to be similar, and in theory it is. But Chris England, state representative for Alabama’s 70th district in Tuscaloosa County, says that’s not how it really works. “They do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Most Democratic candidates run despite the party. Whenever you talk to somebody who’s planning on running as a Democrat, and you ask them if they’re interested in running, you tell them upfront that the Democratic party will not help you, they’re incapable of it, there’s no leadership, and you’re pretty much on your own.” England went on to elaborate on what it is the state party doesn’t do. “I mean, if you look at it right now, they don’t even maintain a consistent social media presence, they don’t do any fundraising, they don’t really do any candidate recruitment, and you don’t really see anybody complaining about it.”
I repeatedly asked Alabama Democratic Party Chair Nancy Worley and Alabama Democratic Conference member Joe Reed for comment. Both declined to be interviewed.
Steve Flowers says for the vast majority of Alabama’s political history, the power balance was very different. “We were a totally Democratic state. That doesn’t mean we were Democratic like the rest of the New York Democrats, or the California Democrats. We just, out of tradition, ran as Democrats. Well, when that changed in the ‘60s, and ‘70s, and ‘80s, we made an about-face and became a totally Republican state.” And the result? “The party just atrophied, and as the apathy increased, the expectations of leadership decreased, and when you put somebody in office who’s basically just sitting there with no expectations… We don’t pay them and we get what we pay for, essentially.”
Terri Lathan says not getting paid doesn’t bother her too much. “I’m a 42-year volunteer. I just turned 60, but I’ve been 42 years volunteering in the Republican Party. I’ve never taken a paycheck. I still don’t. I work 40 hours a week for something I love. We don’t do that for money. All our folks are volunteers, because we believe in the cause – the bigger cause.”
Democratic House member Chris England says despite the dysfunction he sees in the state Democratic party, he thinks there’s still an energized base of support in Alabama. He points to last December as an example. “We were very effective in the Doug Jones election, for example, in communicating through various means, whether it be social media, print media, radio ads and so forth, outside of the Democratic Party structure, to get the word out, to get people to the polls.”
Steve Flowers warns against putting too much stock in Doug Jones’ election win. “The Jones situation was a complete anomaly. It will probably never happen again in a hundred years.” But Chris England isn’t so sure. “You know, obviously that was a very unique circumstance with a very, very flawed Republican candidate. But we created a number of new voters, and if we can capture those numbers again and bring them out and increase them a little bit, I think we can prevail on November 6.”
On the Republican side, Terri Lathan isn’t willing to sleep on her advantage. “My number one concern always is not that we don’t have the money, not that we don’t have the content or the policy or really great candidates. It’s complacency. That people will say Oh, they’ve got everything. Oh, I don’t need to go vote. They’re going to win. The Republicans are going to win anyway. What difference does it make?” She comes back to that football analogy, looking at the Crimson Tide: “Champions get up every day thinking: ‘What can I do better? How can I run faster? What can I do to improve? Gosh, I made a mistake last time. What can I do to fix that?’ And so I like to apply that to the political world, too. I get up every day thinking like that. I don’t get up thinking, ‘Yay, we have it all, I can take today off.’ I think that’s a mistake, and so I plan to keep us at the top of our game.”
Alabama is at the top of their game – they trounced Missouri at homecoming 39 to 10. And if the pundits and the party analysts are right, you’ll likely see a different team of elephants with similar margins of victory come Tuesday.
I’m Alex AuBuchon, APR news in Tuscaloosa.