“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), and 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 insecure of putting a Doug Jones sign in her yard on a tranquil cul-de-sac in Calera,a small but growing exurb of Birmingham. “But people kept whispering, ‘I appreciate your sign.’ They could see I’m just a normal mom, and 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. final year Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton there by 28 points. The Alabama Democratic Party is dysfunctional and deeply riven, or 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: economist.com