As Alabama voters prepared to head to the polls in today’s closely watched Senate election, volunteer election workers headed home to California, Oregon, North Carolina … and Franklin County.
Six volunteers — from Greenfield, Turners Falls, Shelburne Falls, Wendell and Leverett — were among the hundreds of campaign volunteers who tried to make a difference in what they were told could be a critical election for Alabama as well as the nation.
“I had some trepidations about going,” said George Esworthy of Shelburne Falls, as he drove back through Virginia with David Detmold of Turners Falls and Wesley Blixt of Greenfield Monday. On Friday, they had driven south to work in and around Montgomery for Democratic candidate Doug Jones. “It’s a moral dilemma for a lot of people there. I think everybody there who pays attention to politics is well aware that this is of nationwide importance. This is a big deal.”
A Democratic win in the deeply conservative state would narrow the Republican margin of control in Congress, which is why progressive-leaning groups have sent help to Jones.
Esworthy said he spoke with voters who preferred, rather than voting for a Democrat, to vote for Republican Roy Moore — who has been accused of sexual misconduct involving teens years ago — in hopes that he would be thrown out of the Senate and replaced with a Republican gubernatorial appointee.
“It’s reversed from the days when there were people in the South who’d say they’d rather vote for a yellow dog than for a Republican,” Esworthy said.
The six volunteers, who were supported in part by Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution, reported on a snowy Friday evening at Jones campaign headquarters where they were handed lists of likely Jones voters to canvass door to door Saturday morning in Woodlawn, a “downtrodden” black community in northeast Birmingham, before going on to the suburb of Fultondale in the afternoon, said Detmold.
“We talked to everyone we could find,” he said. “Anyone sitting in a car that was parked, anyone working in the yard.”
An overwhelming number of blacks who responded said they planned to vote for Jones, and to a lesser extent, whites said the same. They also spoke against Moore, members of the Franklin County contingent said.
Detmold recounted one man in his 30s working in his Fultonville yard when they were leaving who told him, “Roy Moore has done a lot of bad things,” but who said he was undecided about who to vote for.
“I think people are struggling with this,” Detmold said. “It was the reaction of so many [volunteers] we met, that if we could turn out the vote, it would empower all of us to work even harder to make sure the Senate goes Democratic next year if Jones wins.”
Everyone realizes that Alabama’s solidly Democratic African-American vote could be key, one retired air freight worker told Detmold. That was the message, too, at a packed 16th Street Baptist Church service on Sunday attended by all six Franklin County volunteers, where the Rev. Arthur Price Jr. told parishioners they didn’t have to look at the hallway’s black-and-white photos of attack dogs and fire hoses spraying voting rights demonstrations in 1962 and 1963 to recall “the blood, sweat and tears that went into gaining the right to vote.”
“The eyes of the nation and the world will be on us. Your vote is your voice,” said Price.
Tim Bullock of Leverett, who drove down with Jean Hebden of Greenfield and Jim Thornley of Wendell, said Birmingham’s black community understands the importance of voting, “and saw this chance to vote against Moore as being just as important as it was in 1963. At the church, it was mentioned several times that this vote was just as important at those historical moments.”
Concentrating their get-out-the vote effort in Birmingham, with its number of voters, seemed like a good place for their efforts, said Bullock, who said he was a little worried about police being upset about the influx of Northerners to affect the vote.
Even white households where voters said that they wouldn’t be voting for Jones were courteous, said Bullock, who in 1998 visited Alabama as part of a civil rights walk with Leverett Peace Pagoda.
“Everything we do that works towards good counts,” he said. “We might not see the outcomes as we’re doing it, but effort and intention counts for a lot. I think the communities we worked through were also heartened by the fact people were coming from all over the country because they cared about what was going on.”
Blixt said, “There was a prevailing outrage about Roy Moore that dominated, more than enthusiasm for Doug Jones. In Woodlawn, there was not a lot of expectation that anything would change for them no matter who wins, but just suspending disbelief because of the outrage over Roy Moore.”
Thornley called the effort “a wonderful experience,” adding from a rest stop in West Virginia that he’s “hopeful but realistic. … I’m a strong believer that things can happen and will happen and we need to facilitate the direction it’s going in with as much good spirit as we possibly can.”
Hebden said, “We decided to take this show on the road because it’s desperate times.”
The Alabamians she spoke with said they were tired of seeming like “the buffoons of the nation, and they wanted to show that they were moral people and had smart people. A lot of people are hoping [voters] will either put in a write-in candidate, or not vote at all, and that will give Doug Jones a better chance.”
Hebden added that she was most moved by attending the service at 16th Street Baptist Church, where four girls had died in a 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing. And she was struck by a sign at campaign headquarters showing a “voter protection line phone number.”
“I realized, it’s serious,” she said.