What Happened to Doug Jones?

Late in the 9 o’clock hour on Election Night, at a sprawling outdoor patio in downtown Birmingham, a pall fell over the watch party for Doug Jones’s Senate campaign as it became clear their candidate had lost his bid for reelection. Friends and family of the senator, many of them establishment Alabama Democrats, exchanged sighs as they embraced in front of a jumbo screen broadcasting CNN. Young campaign staffers began to chain-smoke and drain their beers with abandon.

“This is a fucking disaster!” a Democratic source with knowledge of Jones’s campaign strategy told me as the CNN anchors reported on the vanquished Democrats across the rest of the U.S. Senate map—a disappointing reminder that Trumpism was alive and well. “Two hundred and twenty-five thousand dead,” the source continued. “He shit-talks the troops. It doesn’t make any sense.” Jones’s loss struck them as particularly tragic. “Alabama was tight. It was going to be hard to win. But it wasn’t supposed to look like this. Doug deserved better than this.”

When Jones came into office, winning a special election against Roy Moore for Jeff Sessions’s vacant Senate seat in 2017, he became a rare Democrat to hold statewide office in deep-red Alabama. The last time a Democratic senator had prevailed here was at the end of the Dixiecrat era, in 1992, when Richard Shelby was first reelected, only to defect to the GOP two years later. The state hasn’t gone for a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976. In 2016, Donald Trump won here by nearly 30 points.

Jones, a civil rights attorney best known for successfully prosecuting two former Ku Klux Klansmen for their role in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, managed to blend a commitment to social justice with natural Southern charm, and his victory was heralded as a sign of promise for a party still reeling from Trump’s surprise win in 2016. On Twitter, Senator Cory Booker said Jones’s victory offered “a needed renewal of hope and the first ray of light of a rising sun and a coming new day.” Senator Elizabeth Warren also joined in, tweeting, “If we take away 1 more lesson from Alabama, it’s this: Dems can win in every district & state across the country. So we need to fight harder than ever to recruit, support, & elect candidates & compete in every election.”

“This is a fucking disaster! Alabama was tight. It was going to be hard to win. But it wasn’t supposed to look like this. Doug deserved better than this.”

Three years later, although the national media saw his defeat as a foregone conclusion, turning their attention instead to new Democratic hopefuls in Maine and South Carolina and Kentucky, much of Jones’s staff had still felt, late into the contest, that Jones was the candidate to lead the Democratic charge against Mitch McConnell’s stranglehold on the Senate. An internal poll had shown him ahead by one point the Thursday before Election Day.

And yet Jones had lost by a 21-point margin. Beyond the dread of discovering that Trumpism was far stronger than the polls had indicated was the feeling among some in his campaign that they’d been used by national party leaders who were happy to fundraise off of Jones’s growing national profile as a resistance darling, only to then redirect those resources to boondoggle Senate races like the one in Kentucky.

“Doug Jones is putting his neck out, voting for impeachment and voting against ACB and Kavanaugh,” continued the source. “Meanwhile, the national party is pouring millions into races that never had a shot, and never had a strategy to begin with. And what did that investment get them? They lost by the same margins as Doug did.”

In Iowa, for example, Democratic Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield added $28.7 million to her campaign coffers in Q3 alone, more than Jones’s reported $26.27 million for the entire election cycle, and still lost to Joni Ernst by more than six points. And in Kentucky, Amy McGrath had a total of more than $84 million in her war chest, more than three times that of Jones’s total haul, and she still lost to McConnell by nearly 20 points.

Twenty-eight hours before the polls closed in Alabama, Jones addressed a gaggle of supporters and local press at the modest Montgomery headquarters of the Alabama AFL-CIO. Dressed in khakis, a blue button down, and a gray sport coat, the 66-year-old struck an avuncular figure as he railed against how he was being defined by his Republican challenger, Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach and Trump loyalist. “My Lord, you would have thought that I was the one breaking out windows in Birmingham,” Jones said of an attack ad that characterized his appearance at a George Floyd protest as condoning the property destruction that followed.

It was just one way Jones felt his record was being distorted. He supported Black Lives Matter, but no, he didn’t support defunding police. He was pro-choice, but no, he didn’t support late-term abortions. He was for common-sense gun laws, but no, he didn’t want to repeal the 2nd Amendment. “Good Lord! Ron’s seen my rifle, and he really wanted it,” Jones said, referring to his friend Bren Riley, the head of the Alabama chapter of the AFL-CIO and the host of the campaign stop.

"All they got to do in Alabama’s fly a picture of Nancy Pelosi from Mobile to Huntsville and they got every son of a bitch, every white guy in Alabama pissed off.”

What Jones also supported was the right for Alabama workers to unionize, the expansion of Medicaid and rural healthcare, and state funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. On that last item, Jones threw his hands up in exasperation. “It’s really funny watching Trump take credit,” he said. “His budgets have been level funding for HBCUs, and there was me and Kamala Harris that got 14-percent increases and permanent funding.”

Conventional wisdom suggests it was a fluke that Jones got the chance to work alongside Senator Harris at all, having won the 2017 special election to fill Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat only because he was running against Roy Moore, whose campaign was derailed by late-breaking allegations of sexual misconduct and pursuing underage girls.

But Paul Maslin, a veteran Democratic operative who began his career working for Jimmy Carter and served as a pollster for the incumbent senator’s campaign, told me earlier this year that Jones was indeed a viable candidate to win reelection. “People have conveniently forgotten—or never knew—that [in 2017] we were two points behind before the Washington Post story broke about the teenage girl stuff,” he said.

In Maslin’s estimation of Jones’s 2020 chances, if the campaign could get high African-American turnout (27 percent of Alabama’s electorate), then they basically only needed about 31 to 32 percent of the white vote to get reelected. And just like the idea of shy Trump voters in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Detroit, Alabama Democrats had a notion about shy Jones voters—church-going folks who would smile and nod at their Trump-supporting friends before pulling the lever for a man universally seen as decent and honorable, liberal bona fides be damned.

After his stump speech at the Alabama AFL-CIO, I asked Jones if, in order to appeal to enough Trump voters to win reelection, he had to navigate away from any third-rail issues. “I don’t navigate,” replied the senator. He explained that when he first assumed office, he told his staff, “‘We’re not doing anything based on politics. We’re doing everything based on what we believe to be the right thing for the people of this state,’ knowing that not everybody’s going to agree with it. And so every vote I’ve taken, I’ve been able to come back to Alabama and justify it in a nonpolitical [way]. ... I go with my gut. I go with my heart.”

Pressed for examples, Jones cited voting against two of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and for the impeachment of a president who’s wildly popular in the South.

Jones is a principled public servant, but not so proper that he won’t down some moonshine, which Riley offered after the rest of the press departed the room. An old-school union man and Alabama Democrat, Riley was all smiles as he tended a makeshift bar in his pin-stripe suit. But for all his easy charm, he was the first person in the Jones camp to openly lament the senator’s prospects of winning reelection. “I don’t know,” Riley told me. “Doug’s worked hard. He’s built a record of reaching across the aisle. But shit’s now so God dang crazy. All they got to do in Alabama’s fly a picture of Nancy Pelosi from Mobile to Huntsville and they got every son of a bitch, every white guy in Alabama pissed off.”

Riley believes Jones is the only sensible choice for Alabama workers, but he said that perceptions of unions and the Democratic Party have become so toxic here that the senator has to tread carefully when considering action—something that the national leadership of the AFL-CIO has a hard time appreciating. To wit: When AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka came to Montgomery last year, he told his Alabama chief that if Jones didn’t co-sponsor the PRO Act, a bill that would protect the right of workers to organize, they’d pull their support.

According to Riley, Jones said, “Why should I get the shit beat out of me over a bill that damn McConnell’s never going to let come see the light of day?” Riley said Jones assured him he’d vote for the bill if it ever reached the floor of the U.S. Senate, but he couldn’t stick his neck out and become a co-sponsor. It proved to be a wise decision—the bill never did get a vote in the Senate, and the AFL-CIO never dropped Jones.

On the morning of Election Day, the Jones campaign bus made its first stop at Our Lady of Lourdes, a Catholic church in the northeast corner of Birmingham, one of the many predominantly Black polling places the senator would visit. A seemingly endless line of voters snaked around the parking lot, many having to wait more than two hours to cast their ballot, according to one longtime poll worker, who calculated that they should have had 15 people working inside the church, instead of the six they were allotted.

“Is this what voter suppression looks like?” I asked Owen Kilmer, a young staffer on the Jones campaign, as we awaited the senator’s arrival.

“The [Alabama] secretary of state’s mantra is, ‘Easy to vote, hard to cheat,’” said Kilmer.

“So you’re saying the Republican secretary of state is responsible for this?” I asked.

“Good thing I got a mask on,” Kilmer replied, hinting at an unseen smirk.

The scene was a stark contrast from what I overheard earlier in the morning at Salem’s Diner in Homewood, a conservative, mostly white community just south of Birmingham, where a white man ordering eggs and coffee reported that his voting experience was “just like going to Chick-fil-A: In and out, no problems.”

When the senator arrived at the church, he took a different view of the lengthy, meandering line. “This is energized voter turnout,” Jones told me as he walked the parking lot, glad-handing his supporters and thanking them for their patience. “People are just really fired up.”

Though his strategy for the day was focused on his Black Democratic base, at one point he also turned to an older white woman in a red T-shirt with the letters T-R-U-M-P emblazoned in the shape of an elephant. She was excited to take a selfie with the senator, but when I asked her who she was voting for, she only expounded on her devotion to the president.

When asked about voting for Jones, she mustered a reluctant smile and shook her head no. The moment brought to mind a famous quote by Lyndon Johnson, who, upon passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, remarked, “We’ve lost the South for a generation.” I asked Jones if we were still living with that generation today.

“We’ve still got part of that generation,” replied Jones, “but there’s a couple of new generations that have come since then. Generations that grew up with that Civil Rights Act. Generations that grew up with the Voting Rights Act. Generations that grew up with gay rights and gay friends, that really believe that the future of this country is for everyone, not just a privileged few or a select few. So yeah, there’s still folks around, and we’ve not moved them. As long as there’s human beings, we never get past some things. But the fact is, I think we’re seeing in this country a real change.”

At the watch party later that night, it was clear that the change Jones spoke of had not yet fully arrived in Alabama. In his concession speech, Jones, flanked by his wife and two grown sons, struggled to hold back tears. “We’ve been true to our principles,” he said. “And I believe one day, with the help that we’ve had with the Democratic Party, the change that we’ve made, we’ll be proven right on a lot of things.”

But for all that talk of progress, there was a growing sense of trepidation in the crowd that they’d been left out to dry by the national party. Perhaps the campaign’s suspicion extended to the national press, many of whom had long ago viewed Democratic defeat in Alabama as a fait accompli. At the conclusion of Jones’s speech, a campaign staffer flatly informed me that the event was over, and that the senator would not be taking any questions. “I will inform you of any advised media tomorrow,” he said.

And so it was more than a little surprising when the Democratic source who’d ranted about the 225,000 dead and Trump’s shit-talking of the troops called me the next morning to expound on how “Doug deserved better than this.”

“I’ve heard from bundlers that the DSCC [the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] and Senate Majority Pac were fundraising in Doug Jones’s name and none of that went to Alabama,” the source said. “Instead, it appears they were just funneling cash to their hand-picked darlings, like Amy McGrath in Kentucky and Jaime Harrison in South Carolina—and what did that get us? Meanwhile, the Jones campaign is on the ground for three years now, building up the grassroots with a real-deal candidate who has shown he can win statewide in the South, the likes of which the party hasn’t seen in generations.

“And what are the donors going to do?” the source continued, growing more irate. “They’re going to get wise and start asking where their money is going to. Meanwhile, that’ll leave the AOC wing of the party to go off on its own and over the next two election cycles we’ll get further tarnished as the party of radical socialism. And Doug Jones is too honorable to say these things out loud.”

It’s a fracture in the Democratic Party that unfolded in public over the weekend following the election, in a pair of interviews in The New York Times in which progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and moderate Conor Lamb took shots at each other. In response to Ocasio-Cortez criticizing the Lamb campaign for an anemic Facebook presence, Lamb, who represents a congressional district in western Pennsylvania that Trump won in 2016, blasted the New York congresswoman for undermining the party with anti-fracking tweets during a presidential debate.

Senator Jones himself had some concerns about Democratic intra-party politics. In a post-election phone interview on Wednesday, he spoke about wanting to see a change in how the national party funded its candidates. “I would like to see more operated under the DNC, because I think that that’s more of a grassroots, state level,” he said. “My concern has been with [the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] that they would lunge from candidate to candidate. And they don’t do the work at the grassroots level. They look for what I call ‘The New Shiny Penny.’

“Look how much we outspent Tuberville,” Jones continued. “Look how much Jaime outspent Lindsey Graham. So it’s not just about money. We have money. It’s not just about resources. We have resources. It’s about the electorate. And when you are trying to build back the trust of the electorate, you got to do more than just run a candidate with resources.

“It takes a lot of work over time. And the Republicans have been very, very good at doing that. And where I think that Democrats in the South have opportunities is if we confront some of these social issues head on, like I did. Like abortion. Like guns, gays. Just confront those, head on. The demographics are changing. You cannot try to mealy-mouth these things and hide behind them. You’ve got to let folks know where you stand. And explain that you’re not an extremist, and you’re there for them. And maybe we don’t always agree on a couple of things about these issues, but we can find some common ground to agree on.”

Jones ultimately only outperformed Joe Biden in Alabama by a little more than three percentage points. Compare that to Jaime Harrison’s race in South Carolina, where the Democratic Senate hopeful edged the top of the ticket by only eight tenths of a percentage point—despite raising more than $100 million all told, more than four times what Jones had to work with.

But Jones will leave office with a credential that no other Democrat gained in the Trump era: He won and held a U.S. Senate seat in the Deep South. According to a Politico article handicapping the short-list for Biden’s cabinet, which was based on “dozens of conversations with Biden aides, his close allies, lobbyists and Hill staff,” Jones is the favorite for attorney general.

During my conversation with Jones on Wednesday, I asked him if he would be open to a role in a Biden White House.

“I’d have to say, I would be open,” the senator said. “They’re going to have a difficult time. We are still a very divided country. It’s going to be a very divided Congress, and he needs to pick the best folks that he’s comfortable with, that can help him. Work with what appears to be a Republican Senate. Heal some wounds, and move this country forward. So I’m certainly open, but that’s about as far as I’ll go right now.

“I will say this,” Jones continued. “I do hope and believe that I’ll be able to be of some assistance to that transition and the administration, in trying to help select those folks. Joe called me last night, right after my race was called.”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“We talked a little bit,” said Jones, “and it’ll just kind of remain between the two of us. … But we’ve been friends for a long, long time. And I told him that the most important thing, at this moment in this time and this place, is for him to get elected. And to pull it out, and then we’ll talk again. And that’s how we left it.”

According to a Democratic source, on Saturday, after Biden was announced as the next president of the United States, the Biden transition team made contact with Jones.

Originally Appeared on GQ