Might Democrats Actually Have a Chance in Alabama? (slate.com)

[eppur_se_muova]

It depends on whether a little-known candidate with a very famous name can beat the party favorite.

By Jim Newell

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama—Wally Vandergrift of Birmingham is a lifelong Democrat. “I’m a real anomaly in the state of Alabama, believe me,” he told me on Saturday. And for the “first time in a long time,” he said, “I feel hopeful about this one.”

Vandergrift was talking, improbably enough, about the special Senate election to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ old seat. And he’s not the only Democrat in the state—or nationally—allowing himself to feel a twinge of optimism. Vandergrift and I were talking in Saturn, a new-ish Birmingham music venue where Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones was hosting a rally ahead of Tuesday’s primary with special guest Tim Ryan, the Ohio congressman who unsuccessfully challenged Nancy Pelosi for the Democratic leadership in December. Ryan wasn’t the first national political figure to take note of Jones that week. Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights legend, had endorsed Jones several days earlier. And on Friday, an old friend of Jones, former Vice President Joe Biden, endorsed him too.

When I asked Ryan why he had come to campaign for Jones, he told me that he’d been reading about the race over recess, found himself intrigued by the opportunity of a deep-red pickup, and was impressed by Jones’ record. As a Clinton-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, Jones successfully prosecuted Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry, two Ku Klux Klan members involved in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls but had never faced justice.
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The cautious optimism among Democrats is in large part a reaction to the embarrassments the statewide Republican Party has brought upon itself of late. Since the beginning of 2016, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, Roy Moore—now the leading candidate in the GOP Senate primary—was removed from his position; the speaker of the state House, Mike Hubbard, was sentenced to jail for violating state ethics laws; and the governor, Robert Bentley, resigned amid a sex scandal and misdemeanor campaign finance violations. A couple of months before his resignation, Bentley had appointed the state attorney general who was investigating him, Luther Strange, to temporarily fill Sessions’ seat. The murky circumstances of that appointment have haunted Strange’s special election primary campaign. That race, between Moore, Strange, and Rep. Mo Brooks, hasn’t been flattering for the party, either, as candidates have jockeyed to portray themselves as closest to President Donald Trump and trashed one another in endless television ads. (“They all dropped their pants, and what I saw was not very appealing,” is how Gottfried Kibelka, a Democrat from Birmingham, described the Republican primary to me at the Jones rally.)
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more: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/democrats_have_a_shot_in_the_alabama_special_election.html

[librechik]

1. I doubt it. Alabama is the crookedest state in the union

except for New Jersey.