After Alabama Win, Can Black Voters Help Democrats Elsewhere?

In Alabama, African-American voters helped power an underdog Democrat to a stunning upset victory in the southern state's special U.S. Senate election. 

Now, Democratic leaders hope that display of strength can be replicated in other parts of the country they once had all but written off.

"We turned a lot of folks out," said Richard Mauk, chairman of the Democratic Party in Alabama's Jefferson County, calling Doug Jones's Senate candidacy "transformative."

"It re-energized people that can now be part of a Democratic base," he told AFP.

Mauk and other Democrats noted that Jones had managed to carve out a win over scandal-hit Republican rival Roy Moore in a deeply conservative state where the Democratic Party was effectively dead.

"We had nothing," Mauk told AFP. "The Democratic Party in Alabama has been non-functioning for years."

Party leaders said lessons learned from the unexpected Alabama win could be applied to next year's mid-term elections, when Democrats hope to wrest back control of both the House and Senate.

And the African-American vote is being seen as an important part of the national formula.

"African-Americans have been the backbone of the Democratic Party," said a jubilant Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Speaking to CNN, Perez chalked up the victory to unprecedented organization in a state which Trump won by 28 points last year over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Influential black Democratic congressman Keith Ellison agreed.

"Voter turn-out did it for Doug Jones. African-American turn-out, overall Alabama turn-out, both way up. It's about organizing," Ellison tweeted.

- 'Compete everywhere' -

After Clinton's loss to Trump in 2016, the Democratic Party relaunched an age-old debate within its ranks -- should it have spent more time campaigning in areas that previously seemed unwinnable Republican strongholds?

Some said that if Clinton had done so in the Rust Belt, she might have won.

After Jones's victory, Clinton seemed to confirm that the party needed to adopt new tactics. 

"If Democrats can win in Alabama, we can -- and must -- compete everywhere. Onward!" she said on Twitter.

According to exit polls, black voters made up 29 percent of the electorate and 96 percent of them cast their ballots for Jones.

But some warned the party not to buy into another time-honored political given: that black voters always vote for Democrats.

NBA legend Charles Barkley, who urged voters of his native state to elect Jones in an appearance at his final campaign rally, nevertheless offered the party some typically blunt-spoken advice.

Democrats have "taken the black vote and the poor vote for granted for a long time," he said.

"It's time for them to get off their ass and start making life better for black folks and people who are poor."

- 'Organize and inspire' -

In Alabama, a battleground during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Democrats went door to door urging black voters to choose Jones, who is the first Democratic senator elected in Alabama in 25 years.

Result: long lines of black voters could be seen in cities such as Montgomery, where Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat on a bus in 1955, and Birmingham, where four young girls were killed in the 1963 bombing of a black church.

Jones, a 63-year-old former federal prosecutor, earned his reputation as a champion of civil rights by prosecuting two members of the Ku Klux Klan responsible for the church bombing and sending them to prison for life.  

A number of black politicians and athletes also stumped for him during the final days of the campaign including Barkley and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Barack Obama, America's first black president, personally lent his weight to Jones with a robo-call to Alabama voters urging them to support the Democrat.

"He's been a champion for justice," John Lewis -- a civil rights icon who was brutally beaten by state troopers in Selma, Alabama, during a 1965 march known as "Bloody Sunday -- said of Jones during a campaign appearance. "Organize and inspire people to come out and vote like they've never voted before," Lewis said. "You can make it happen."

- Caution -

Marty Connors, a former chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, however cautioned against reading too much into the results.

"This was a referendum on a single candidate," Connors said in a reference to Moore.

Beyond the allegations of sexual impropriety that dogged his candidacy, Moore was twice removed from the state supreme court, the second time for disobeying a U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing gay marriage.

"They were running against a candidate that had an entire 18-wheeler worth of baggage that was pulling behind him."