The Alabama Democratic Party’s troubles with the National party continue.
Earlier this week, the Democratic National Committee voted against a resolution that would have temporarily seated three Alabama DNC members until the state party conducted new elections under monitoring by the DNC.
The vote against that resolution came after three DNC members—including Joe M. Reed, one of the temporarily seated Alabama members—urged members to deny it and send it back to the Credentials Committee for further consideration.
Speaking at the DNC meeting on Monday, Reed called the entire issue a matter of sour grapes by a handful of disgruntled ADP members who are using connections at the national level to disrupt state party governance.
However, two other members, including Matt Hughes, a newly seated Credentials Committee member from North Carolina, urged the no vote in order to unseat Reed and two others and force the committee to explore more punitive measures against ADP.
During an interview with Alabama Politics This Week podcast, Hughes said he urged the no vote because he doesn’t think it makes sense to say that the election was flawed and also that the members who won that flawed election should be seated.
“The Credentials Committee came forward with a relatively nuanced approach, which was, let’s go ahead and seat these folks who are questionable, and we acknowledge that there’s questions, but let’s seat those folks so Alabama has its full contingent and can vote,” Hughes said. “I suggested that folks vote against that credentials report, in part, because if it’s a flawed election, then whoever is voting cannot represent Alabama Democrats. It gives the state, theoretically, full voting strength, but, you know, it was a flawed election to begin with, so who’s being represented by doing that?”
The vote only furthers a long-running feud between some members of the Alabama Democratic Party—primarily those aligned with longtime vice chairman for minority affairs Joe L. Reed and Chairman Randy Kelley—and the national party.
The most recent friction began with a challenge of a vote that occurred last year for Alabama DNC members. ADP leadership couldn’t reach a quorum to hold a vote, then tried to hold one by mail that was too flawed to count and then failed to attain a quorum to hold a re-vote. At that point, despite members holding the DNC membership seats, Kelley declared them vacant and simply appointed three new members.
That action was, of course, challenged and the DNC ordered new votes in April. At that vote, however, members reported a number of issues, mostly related to non-members voting. And that led to the most recent challenge and the Credentials Committee’s proposed resolution, which was voted down.
But this is not, by any stretch, the first of the problems between ADP and the DNC. Those began in 2019, when then-U.S. Sen. Doug Jones orchestrated a revamping of the state party’s bylaws, which significantly diluted Joe L. Reed’s power by spreading the voting power of minority caucuses among several new caucuses that represented more groups, such as Hispanics, youth, Asians and disabled people. Those new bylaws more closely resembled guidelines from the DNC, which have long stopped defining “minority” as simply Black.
The Reeds and their supporters fought back with lawsuits that were largely unsuccessful. But then, with the election of Kelley in 2022, they were back in control. And almost immediately, they set their sights on rewriting the 2019 bylaws and eliminating new caucuses or significantly reducing their voting power.
Over the course of the last three years, various matters—mostly related to suspicious votes and the removal of caucuses—have landed back in front of the DNC’s various committees. The Kelley-Reed faction have fared rather poorly in those hearings, and they have been forced to reluctantly backtrack on some actions.
But throughout those hearings, they have steadfastly maintained that they are being mistreated—usually due to racism—by the Doug Jones faction, which is using its connections with DNC members to cause trouble in Alabama.
That was the crux of Joe M. Reed’s remarks to the DNC on Monday.
“There are politics up here that are being played that are, quite frankly, offensive to people in Alabama,” he said. “The division (is) being stoked by people who don’t win at the state level and then run to the DNC to get their friends to override what happened. The DNC is involved in the management of the Alabama Democratic Party and that’s a bridge too far. If they’re going to do it to Alabama, they’ll do it to anybody here in this room.”
