Alabama Democratic Party


The Alabama Democratic Party is the affiliate of the Democratic Party in the state of Alabama. It is chaired by Randy Kelley.
The Alabama Democratic Party was once one of the most successful political organizations in the United States. Even after the political realignment in the height of the Civil Rights movement and the Republican Party's introduction of the Southern strategy, Democrats continued winning state and local races in Alabama. However, Jimmy Carter became the last the Democratic presidential nominee to win the state in 1976. On a state level, Republicans remained associated with the North, big business, and opportunism. Despite H. Guy Hunt having become the first Republican governor since reconstruction in 1986, Democrats had retained most statewide control. The tide only began to change in the 2000s, after Democrat Don Siegelman narrowly lost the 2002 Alabama gubernatorial election. The Democrats did not lose control of the Alabama legislature until 2010, when the Alabama Republican Party gained a majority in both houses for the first time in 136 years. Alabama lawmaker Roger Bedford, Jr. attributed this to a "Red Obama backlash tsunami", and the growing influence of George W. Bush's Republican Party in the South after the September 11 attacks.
Alabama is now considered a Republican stronghold, a substantial departure from its relatively-recent status as a Democratic stronghold. In Congress, Democrats hold two out of Alabama's seven seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Democrats hold zero statewide offices in Alabama, and they are also the minority party in both of its state legislative chambers.

Current elected officials

Members of Congress

U.S. House of Representatives

Out of the seven seats Alabama is apportioned in the U.S. House of Representatives, two are held by Democrats:
DistrictMemberPhoto
2nd
7th

Statewide offices

  • None
The last two times Democrats won statewide elections in Alabama was in 2008 when Lucy Baxley won 50.25% of the vote in the regularly scheduled election for President of the Alabama Public Service Commission, and in 2017 when Doug Jones, with 49.97% of the vote, won an upset victory in a U.S. Senate special election. Baxley lost re-election in 2012, as did Jones in his bid for a full term in 2020. Jones is the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Alabama, a title that Baxley had held until Jones' swearing in.

State Legislature

The following Democrats hold prominent mayoralties in Alabama:

Creation and ''antebellum'' period

Created during the 1830s under the leadership of conservative figures such as William Rufus King, John Gayle and William Lowndes Yancey, the local Democratic Party took to represent the farmers and the merchants living in Northern Alabama, advocating individual rights and opposing growing centralisation, against the Whigs who represented the urban populations, the Black Belt planters and their businesses allies and who advocated a more active government in the domain of internal improvements.
In Alabama, until the Civil War, the main question were the National Bank, the tariffs and the distribution of the former Indian lands, with the preservation of slavery growing more and more in importance.
The Democratic candidates always won the gubernatorial and presidential elections in this state, except in 1845 when a dissident was elected governor and in 1860 when John Breckinridge won the state for the Southern Democrats.

Civil War and Reconstruction

The Alabama Democratic Party guided by William Lowndes Yancey and others led Alabama to secede from the Union after Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. The Civil War effectively ended slavery but still required a "Constitutional" emancipation of the former slaves by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment which the Democrats did not support, and for the next century the Democratic party was segregationist. The bi-racial Republican Party dominated Alabama politics from about 1868 to 1876 with its uneasy coalition of blacks and whites. This period resulted in major changes in the politics of Alabama, caused by the recently freed slaves voting for the Republican Party and electing Republican officials.
To counter this trend, the Democratic leadership appealed to the White supremacist sentiments and racial solidarity among the White population, and used fraud and violence by the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitaries. This allowed them to win back the governorship in 1874 with George S. Houston.
With the Republican political collapse in the early 1870s, Democrats reasserted control over the state. While most Alabama campaigns had as their main issues taxation, the railroads, and government reform, racial politics were never very far below and oftentimes brazenly in the open. Occasionally, Democratic voters from the lower classes challenged the Bourbon Democrats Black Belt-Big Mule Coalition inside the Democratic Party. Several unsuccessful attempts to challenge the coalition of planters from the Black Belt and industrialists from the emerging city of Birmingham occurred in the party primaries. By the 1890s, these failures caused many poor whites to join with the Populists and the Republicans in a biracial coalition. These efforts came close to dislodging the Democrats from power. But the Democratic leadership broke this populist movement through a combination of fraud, intimidation tactics, and deal-making that ultimately resulted in passage of the 1901 Constitution that disenfranchised almost all black voters and even most poor whites.

As part of the "Solid South"

Adoption of The 1901 State Constitution was intended to permanently end any challenge to one-party Democratic rule and restore white supremacy in government. The Alabama Democratic party's leadership successfully disenfranchised most of the Black and poor Whites in the state, by implementation of a poll tax, literacy tests and a grandfather clause; other dispositions they used in order to reduce the challenges to the Democratic party from other parties and independents were a sore-loser law and a loyalty pledge binding any participant to the Democratic primary to the Democratic candidates in the general election. This strategy was highly effective for the next 70 plus years.
Thereafter, in Alabama, until the 1960s, the main election was consequently the Democratic Party primary, since winning them was tantamount to election. Sometimes Democratic leaders opposed the conservative wing of the party, led by the Black Belt-Big Mule coalition, and other times also held the liberal wing in check that wanted a more activist government. This was usually achieved by the use of overt racial politics in state elections. However, at the same time the party would send to Washington, senators and Congressmen who regularly voted for liberal Democratic economic policies as long as it didn't interfere with maintaining segregation back in Alabama.
In 1904, the Alabama Democratic Party adopted a logo featuring a rooster and the words "White supremacy" that would appear on ballots.
Since the end of Reconstruction, the Democratic presidential candidate always won the state although, in 1928, Al Smith won by a much closer margin because of his Catholicism, his links with Tammany Hall, and his support for the repeal of Prohibition. These factors caused some party leaders to even say they would vote for the Republican presidential nominee, Hoover.

Civil Rights Movement

The Great Migration of Blacks from the Deep South to states such as New York or Ohio, where they would exercise the franchise and where they were an electoral bloc, along with a switch of public opinion meant the National Democratic Party had to act against Jim Crow. However, all the Democratic controlled southern states resisted for years.
In 1948, after the inclusion of a civil rights plank in the national Democratic Party platform and President Truman's earlier decision to integrate the Armed Forces, several Southern delegates to the Democratic National Convention fought back. Almost half of Alabama's delegation walked out of the National Convention in protest. The delegates from Alabama along with others from surrounding states then regathered in Birmingham, Alabama and formed the States' Rights Democratic Party commonly called "Dixiecrats." Leading the walkout of Alabama's delegation was then Democratic Lt. Governor, Handy Ellis. The segregationist Dixiecrats held their National Convention at the city's Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham. The Dixiecrats would nominate then-Democratic governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president and Mississippi governor Fielding Wright for vice president. They faced incumbent Democratic president Harry Truman and the Republican nominee Thomas Dewey and his running mate Governor Earl Warren of California. However, in Alabama, Thurmond was the local Democratic Party's presidential candidate instead of President Harry Truman, who was not even able to secure a ballot position in Alabama due to hostility from pro-segregationist Alabama Democrats.
With the growing pressure from the national Democratic party against segregation, and the state party's continued support for "white supremacy" and the popularity of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 and 1956 elections support for the Democratic party among white Alabamians began to wane at the Presidential level. In this period, Alabama continued to elect pro-segregation Governors with the exception of "Big Jim" Folsom, who was considered to be a "liberal" for his time. During Folsom's second term, the U.S. Congress passed a modest Civil Rights Act of 1957, with strong bi-partisan support but Alabama's all-Democratic delegation voted against it including somewhat liberal Congressman Carl Elliott. Among other things this bill established the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
During the United States presidential election of 1960, as a protest against the civil rights platforms of both national parties, the Alabama Democratic Party ran a slate of five Kennedy-committed Presidential Electors and six unpledged electors, who voted for segregationist U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia.
In 1964, Congress passed by large bi-partisan majorities, a very strong Civil Rights Act of 1964, however, once again, Alabama's all-Democratic delegation voted against it, including Senators John Sparkman and Lister Hill who both supported a 54-day long filibuster against the legislation.
Also, in 1964, Barry Goldwater was the first Republican to carry the state since Grant on 1872; Again, the Alabama Democratic Party denied its own President Lyndon B. Johnson ballot access under the Democratic party banner. Since Johnson was not even present on the ballots eleven unpledged electors ran on the Democratic ticket.
Faced with growing numbers of new Black voters given the franchise thanks to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the state Democratic leadership tried to attract these new voters by measures such as forming the Alabama Democratic Conference and replacing the "White supremacy" with "Democrats" on their logo; nevertheless, the party remained deeply divided on both racial politics and the inside battle between Loyalists, liberals or moderates "loyal" to the national Democratic party, and segregationists Regulars, and on the outside with the National Democratic Party of Alabama, a mainly Black and liberal party.
In 1968, former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace ran for president as the nominee of the American Independent Party, except that in Alabama he was the "Democrat" nominee for president. Once again, the state party failed to support its pro Civil Rights nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. By this time, the National Party then recognized a black-majority replacement party under the direction of African-American John L. Cashin, Jr. and seated his delegation at the 1968 convention under the name of the National Democratic Party of Alabama. Two years later, Cashin would unsuccessfully challenge Wallace election to a second term as governor.
After the 1970 Federal Census and Voting Rights legal challenges, the Alabama Legislature reapportioned itself for the first time in several decades. Part of the result was the creation of two black-majority House districts. These were the first minority-majority seats since black Republicans served in the legislature during Reconstruction. Democrats Thomas J. Reed and Fred Gray were elected as the first minority members in almost one hundred years.