-New Urban "Now What Was That That Happened , Exactly?"- How Black Female Voters Showed Up and Showed Out to Stop Roy Moore from Winning Alabama's U.S. Senate Seat
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| Getting in formation: exit polls show black women were key to swinging the Alabama senate race out of Roy Moore's favor |
In the recent American state election that surprisingly caught the attention of international media, as you might have heard this week, conservative fundamentalist candidate Judge Roy Moore lost his bid for state senator, making the first Senate victory for Democrats in Alabama in decades. In a unexpected win aided by scandal, Doug Jones, a Democrat who fought to prosecute two Ku Klux Klansmen responsible for the deadly historic 1963 Birmingham church bombing, is the state’s new U.S. senator- putting a Democrat in that seat for the first time in over a quarter of a century.
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| COWBOY ROY: Judge Roy Moore rides off to vote for himself in the Alabama senate race that ended in stunning defeat, thanks in part to the black female vote that turned the tide of the election to Doug Jones's favor. |
Other Republicans with national, and in some cases global platforms have openly disassociated themselves from Moore. Given Moore's problematic views on everything from diversity to wanting to get rid of all Constitutional amendments after the Bill of Rights. He has stated in a previous interview: "You know people don't understand how some of these amendments have completely tried to wreck the form of government that our forefathers intended." (that would include, by the way, amendments #13 abolishing slavery; #14 civil rights to equal protection under the law for ALL citizens regardless of color; #15 black citizen's right to vote; #19 women's right to vote; and 24# the right to vote being free of cost, y'all), Alabama native & former George W. Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recorded a robocall for the race, directly urging voters in her home state to "reject bigotry, sexism and intolerance."
According to exit polls, African-American turnout to vote numbered at nearly 30 percent — comparable to what it was in 2008 for President Barak Obama. Exit polls from CNN found that 96 percent of black voters voted for Jones in the Alabama senate election. In a surprise twist to discovering the true key that swung the election against Moore, a demographic breakdown of exit polls published by the Washington Post showed that black women, an estimated 17 percent of the Tuesday night electorate, supported Doug Jones by a 98-2 margin.
On social media, political observers noted that the result was a powerful reminder of the power of black women’s votes. On Wednesday, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez, stated that the election was further evidence of black women being “the backbone of the Democratic Party.” Via Twitter, he said:
Let me be clear: We won in Alabama and Virginia because #BlackWomen led us to victory. Black women are the backbone of the Democratic Party, and we can’t take that for granted. Period.
In either an unusually restrained move or effort to now distance himself from Roy Moore and the political upset, President Donald Trump has refrained from speaking further on the Republican loss.
