Doug Jones likens Joe Reed, Randy Kelley to George Wallace – ‘It’s time that they just retire’

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December 6, 2024

Former Alabama U.S. Sen. Doug Jones thinks it’s time for new leadership in the Alabama Democratic Party if they want to be successful in the future.

This is not the first time that Jones has had issues with his own party in Alabama. In 2019, he led an effort to change Alabama Democratic Party’s bylaws and change the party leadership. The former senator once again called for change during a recent appearance on the “Alabama Politics This Week” podcast.

“This party is a disaster,” Jones said. “I mean, there’s no other way to describe this. I thought it was a disaster before, but it has become even worse. It is just an unmitigated disaster that has nowhere to go. They can’t even get a a quorum to hold a meeting. And the reason they can’t get a quorum to hold a meeting is because the leadership of the party wants to kind of do all these weird shenanigans.”

Jones has often been critical of Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Randy Kelley and Alabama Democratic Conference chairman Joe Reed and once again called out their failures as a leaders.

“It’s been white public officials that have tried to bring folks together,” he argued. “You don’t hear, we don’t have a George Wallace out there anymore that’s a Democrat in Alabama that is dividing people along racial lines. But we do have people that are professed Democrats and leaders in the Democratic Party that do do that, and that makes it a lot tougher, and we’ve got to make sure that Democrats as a whole try to be equal for everybody. It doesn’t matter. And when the chairman of the party continues to talk about and divide people along racial lines, we’re going to struggle. We’re going to struggle getting to first base.”

Jones believes the low turnout of Democratic voters in the Presidential election is just more proof that a change at the top is needed.

“We had the lowest Democratic turnout this time that we’ve ever had,” he said. “The votes were down. In Alabama, we had the lowest voter turnout since 1988., okay? And it’s because…people don’t think that their vote counts, and we can’t recruit candidates to get their name on the ballot when they’re gonna get embarrassed. And that is a real problem. [They] came back from the convention … and they immediately wanna have a change of our bylaws again. That’s all they wanna do – they wanna challenge the DNC, they wanna challenge the bylaws. It’s time that they just that they just retire.”