MONTGOMERY, Alabama -- On a Saturday morning in late January, the State Democratic Executive Committee held its quarterly meeting at the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel & Spa. The deadline for candidates qualifying for primary races was a week away, and the chatter in the lobby was about the big news from the day before – that state Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, wouldn’t be seeking reelection to the Alabama Legislature.
The schadenfreude there was thick for Beason, who was politically wounded when he recorded himself referring to African-Americans as aborigines while cooperating with an investigation into State House corruption.
Those Democrats could snipe at Republicans for racial insensitivity and lack of diversity, but the Alabama Democratic Party has its own diversity problem.
Nationally, Democrats have been successful by cobbling together a majority out of minorities -- white liberals, African-Americans, Native-Americans, Hispanics, women, LGBT – but in Alabama the state party hasn’t.
And while the Alabama Democratic Party is more diverse than the state GOP, it is also more divided. In fact, the executive committee has fought for nearly a year just over how to define diversity.
A generation ago, the Alabama Democratic Party’s black caucus had to fight for representation on the party’s executive committee, but today the party and that caucus, the Alabama Democratic Conference, overlap so much they are nearly synonymous.
Under a 25-year-old consent decree, ADC can select at-large executive committee members to make the committee racially proportionate to the party’s electorate. But it has exercised that power only in terms of black and white. Hispanics and other minority groups are not represented well, if at all, on the committee.
The ADC’s power has put its president, Joe Reed, squarely in the party driver’s seat and has made him a divisive figure. Last year, a spat with then-party chairman Mark Kennedy ended with Kennedy resigning his position and creating a new political group, the Alabama Democratic Majority, which some in the party hoped could reform or replace the state executive committee. At the time, Kennedy denied that was its purpose, but the message was clear: For at least part of the leadership, Alabama’s Democratic party had become too dysfunctional to be salvageable.
What Kennedy and his allies left behind was a smattering of white faces in a mostly black crowd.
But on that recent Saturday morning, the tension in the executive committee was still there – particularly over an amendment for how the party defines a minority.
For the third time in a year, several committee members backed a move to define what “minority” means by adopting the Democratic National Committee’s definition of minorities, including Hispanics, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, youth and women.
But no sooner had the issue come to the floor than another procedural fight erupted and, eventually Chairwoman Nancy Worley allowed a vote that tabled the amendment indefinitely. The diversity amendments supporters argued that tabling it was just a ploy to kill it.
“It’s a kind way of killing something,” Worley said.
Alabama Democratic Party Chairwoman Nancy Worley
The vote split almost perfectly along racial lines. Sen. Vivian Davis Figures was the lone African-American to side with white members pushing the amendment, and at the end of the meeting she asked Worley whether the meeting had been recorded.
“I just wanted to make sure because there were several instances when the chair heard one thing and something else was said, and it was just confusion,” she said. “I just wanted to make sure that we had it on record as to what was actually said.”
Reed, during the same meeting, told the committee that he is drafting his own motion for including other groups, but he does not want to include women in the state party’s definition of minorities.
“Women are not included in my definition because women are half of this committee now under the bylaws,” he said, “so we don’t need to count women as minorities.”
After the meeting, Amy Shadoin, who proposed the tabled diversity amendment, shook her head at the opposition.
“This is supposed to be a big-tent party, and we need to make it as inclusive as possible,” she said. “We need to be able to show that we are open to all voices – to Hispanics, Native Americans and youth. We need to be open.”
Worley tried to patch over the rift with a pep talk, encouraging committee members to support as many Democratic candidates in as many Democratic races as possible.
“It is our job to put a Democrat in every single office in this state,” she said.
When Kennedy left after this fight with Reed, the assumption was that he would take many of the party’s traditional donors with him. If that’s so, then the Alabama Democratic Majority’s financial disclosures don’t reflect it. Its federal disclosures show only $15,848 of receipts for 2013.
And that money didn’t stay with the state party, either. It just left.
When she took over as party chair last year, Worley said that the party was “broke, broke, broke.” It had accumulated almost $500,000 in debt, much of it during former Gov. Don Siegelman’s failed 1999 lottery campaign, and it has never been able to pay that debt down.
At the executive committee meeting, Worley described party finances as weak but stabilized.
“We’re in the black on everything,” she said. “All the bills are paid up.”
A review of the party’s disclosures to the Federal Election Commission shows that the party operated in the black in 2013, but its resources are meager and the largest source of revenue was the allowance it gets from the Democratic National Committee. Its cash flow is half what it was a decade ago.
The party had $276,005 in receipts last year against $260,275 in disbursements.
In comparison, the Alabama Republican Party reported $977,244 in receipts and $868,964 in disbursements.
While Republicans had $294,504 in federal election disbursements, Alabama Democrats had $11,759.
Most of the Democratic party’s expenditures were for operating expenses, and in the last year, its leaders have said publicly that the party has had trouble paying rent and keeping the lights on.
Struggling for credibility
Considering the state of the party and the political tilt of Alabama, running for statewide office as a Democrat might seem like a fool’s errand. But it is essential for the party to field candidates to maintain at least some credibility with voters.
When voters cast their ballots in the fall, several races won't have a Democrat to choose. When qualifying ended, the party had not found candidates for Public Service Commission, the U.S. Senate or the Alabama Supreme Court.
Of the statewide races up and down the ticket, only one will be contested in a June primary. Former Congressman Parker Griffith will face Kevin Bass, a former professional baseball player from Fayette, for the Democratic nomination for governor.
Republicans, in contrast, have a full ticket, with all but three races contested. Even Gov. Robert Bentley faces more primary challengers in his race for reelection than any Democrat.
Griffith is considered the favorite in that contest, but many in his own party question whether he is a Democrat. After winning election to Congress, Griffith bolted to the GOP, only to leave the Republican Party after being defeated by a more conservative candidate two years later.
About a week before the qualifying deadline, the Democratic executive committee allowed Griffith to rejoin the state Democratic party, and he filed paperwork to enter the race about 15 minutes before the deadline.
In the aftermath, Worley was relatively tepid compared to her partisan enthusiasm just a week earlier. The chairwoman who said it was the job of the party to put a Democrat in every office pivoted to say it was no big deal that Republicans would go unchallenged in some races. She said that filling vacancies on the ballot was never a top priority.
“Some of those statewide seats, nobody went out and searched for candidates,” she said. “People had to really want to be candidates because we were obviously trying to find good legislative candidates and good candidates to put in some of those top statewide offices that help your ticket.”
Meanwhile, Reed, who is often blamed for making the party hostile to white candidates, argued that white voters needed to see who is really fighting for their interests. Medicaid, the signature issue for Democrats this season, benefits everyone, he said, and if some of the state’s storied Democrats were alive today – Lister Hill and John Sparkman – they would be in favor of it.
“So we’ve got to get the working white people to understand you ain’t helping yourself by turning down Medicaid,” he said. “And you ain’t going to have federal money and state’s rights, either.”
The Alabama Democratic Party, he said, needs those white voters that it has lost.
“The white people of this state -- the working people I’m talking about, I’m not talking about the wealthy and the filthy rich -- when they understand and start to vote for themselves, rather than voting for the rich folks, they’ll be all right,” he said.
Alabama Media Group's Mike Cason contributed reporting for this article.