The Alabama Republican Party is in disarray.
I cannot tell you how long I’ve waited to write those words. Through scandal after scandal and failure after failure of the Alabama Democratic Party, and through one success after another for ALGOP over the last 15 years, there has been one thing you could rely on: Alabama Republicans were like a bunch of Stepford wives with their robotic agreement on pretty much everything.
Even when they didn’t agree privately, they pretended they agreed when in public.
Those days are over.
To oversimplify things a bit, there are, right now, two competing factions within the Alabama Republican Party: the far-right-wing loons, who want to dictate everything from your preferred sexual positions to how you fold the toilet paper when you use the restroom, on one side, and the slightly-less-far-right loons, who leave the bathroom and bedroom stuff alone and worry more about gouging taxpayers through a constant barrage of corporate tax breaks and elimination of environmental protections, on the other.
These two groups are at odds, and the fight has reached all the way into the leadership of the party.
There have been candidates kicked off the ballot for incredibly thin reasons. There have been calls for audits of party finances. There have been allegations of misspent money and conflicts of interest and overall mismanagement. There have been fights and shouts and backstabbing and undercutting.
It has been glorious to watch.
Because they are exactly the same things that undermined the Alabama Democratic Party 20 years ago.
What’s happening now with the Alabama Republican Party is what often happens when a party becomes too powerful for too long. It starts to test the limits of that power. It tries to protect that power. It tries to squeeze out any potential challenges to that power.
Look at ALGOP’s recent objectives: Enforcing ridiculous restrictions on any challengers to incumbents; closing primaries; pushing for purity tests; pushing out anyone who bucks the status quo.
All the same stuff that the powerful Alabama Democratic Party tried in the late 1990s.
With that in mind, you would think that the Alabama Dems, more than adequately reprimanded for their misguided deeds back then, would have learned their lesson. Would have learned that continuing to open the tent to more and more people and more and more ideas doesn’t threaten power. It actually expands it, although maybe not to the people those in power want.
But if you thought those lessons had been learned, you would be wrong.
Just as ALGOP was further weakening itself, out came a letter over the weekend from longtime ADP leader Joe Reed, in which he threatened to “excommunicate” anyone who dared challenge the practice of straight-ticket voting.
Sigh.
For those unfamiliar, Alabama is one of only a few states that still allows voters to check a box at the top of a ballot and automatically cast a vote for every member of a particular political party on that ballot. It is how Republicans maintain a clear edge in the upcoming midterm elections despite the growing discontent among voters with their policies and despite Democrats fielding a solid selection of candidates in many races.
Because when you only have to check a box at the top, you don’t actually have to do the hard things—like researching down-ballot candidates or justifying to yourself a vote for Tommy Tuberville over Doug Jones. You give yourself a cheap cop-out—that you’re voting for the ideals of the party over the flaws of the candidates.
Reed wants this abomination to continue.
In a hyperbolic letter to pretty much all Alabama Democrats, Reed, the chairman of the Alabama Democratic Conference (the Black Caucus of ADP) and vice-chair for minority affairs of ADP, claims that doing away with the straight-ticket voting option would destroy the Alabama Democratic Party. While he didn’t spell out his reasoning in this letter, he has, in previous years, stated that eliminating the straight-ticket option would hurt down-ballot Democratic candidates.
Maybe that’s true. But only the ones who were relying on cheap, uninformed votes to begin with. If you can’t win an election by out-working a Republican candidate in a district in which straight-ticket voting would put you over the top, you don’t deserve to win.
And I’d really be interested to learn where this straight-ticket option has helped Democrats in Alabama. The party has been annihilated in every election since 2010, and any close wins or close losses have consistently come with grumbles and complaints over having to overcome the straight-ticket votes. I seriously wonder how many seats Democrats might have flipped in recent years if not for this brain-dead approach to voting propping up gooberific ALGOP candidates who did nothing but toss a Bible, a shotgun and a picture of Donald Trump on a mailer.
You know why I wonder? Texas is why I wonder.
Texas eliminated straight-ticket voting in 2020, with Republicans believing that the move would hamstring Democrats in key counties. Those Republicans believed, as Alabama Republicans believe today, that they had the voting majority locked up through gerrymandering and propaganda, and they wanted to expand that power.
What they failed to count on, however, is that straight-ticket voting is yet another means of protecting incumbents. And when that protection is removed, and those incumbents don’t perform to the satisfaction of the working class voters, those incumbents become election losers. If voters have to move down a ballot, it turns out that they’ll actually spend some time considering whether a candidate—even one in the party they’re most aligned with—should get their votes. And that turns every single election into an actual contest.
And it’s one reason Texas is suddenly a battleground state—from the top of the ticket to the very bottom.
Voters in this state complain constantly about the never-changing, do-nothing-but-bad legislature and the perpetual politicians who govern us. Ridding ourselves of straight-ticket voting would help with that. It would at least force candidates to work a little harder, and maybe learn the three branches of government.
But for Alabama Democrats, the choice here is really not a choice at all. Because you’ve lived it. You know the consequences of protecting power over respecting the power of voting. You saw the consequences up close. You’re watching them from afar happen to ALGOP today.
Be the party that caters to the masses. And let the best candidates win.
