By Barnett Wright | The Birmingham Times
Alabama has turned into a battleground state in the 2024 presidential election, but the fight is not between Democrats and Republicans, but some Democrats at the state and national level.
The clash comes less than two weeks before the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago where Vice President Kamala Harris has secured enough delegates to be the party’s presidential nominee against Republican Donald Trump.
In July, Alabama’s delegates voted unanimously to endorse Harris as the Democratic nominee for president. The state has 52 delegates, plus four alternates.
However, Randy Kelley, chair of the Alabama State Democratic Party, has accused the DNC of engaging in “shenanigans” by appointing delegates to the party’s upcoming convention rather than allowing Alabama Democrats to elect their preferred delegate candidates.
Jamie Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee, in a letter dated August 1, 2024, warned Kelley to “refrain from any further miscommunication or misinformation to convention participants” regarding the “status of Alabama’s delegation to the National Convention” in Chicago from Aug. 19-22.
Kelley denied there was any “misinformation” but a national party that “handpicked” delegates that the people of Alabama did not get a chance to vote on, he told The Times on Thursday. “No other [state] party in the history of the Democratic National Committee has been robbed of all delegates,” Kelley said. “… this is unprecedented.”
Harrison wrote that the Credentials Committee of the DNC on July 21, 2024, credentialed “the duly elected” Alabama district-level delegates to the convention.
Kelley told The Times that Alabama is “the only state in the Democratic Party and territories where we didn’t vote on a single delegate … the Democratic Party says it stands for a free and fair elections, [but] delegates were picked by some forces inside our party in the state along with people who don’t even live in Alabama,” Kelley said.
Friction between Alabama Democrats and between the Alabama Democratic Party and the national party is not new, AL.com has reported. Five years ago, then-U.S. Sen. Doug Jones, backed by the DNC, joined with a faction of the state party to approve new by-laws and replace longtime Chairman Nancy Worley, a Joe Reed ally, with state Rep. Chris England.
Reed is a longtime party leader and chairman of the Alabama Democratic Conference, the party’s most influential Black organization,
Control flipped back in 2022 when the State Democratic Executive Committee elected Kelley as chairman with the backing of Reed and the Alabama Democratic Conference.
The state party was supposed to elect delegates on June 8. However, the party failed to reach a quorum on their meeting that day, so the state’s delegation selected those positions, according to a statement by the DNC.
In the event a delegate was not approved, the Biden campaign selected a replacement.
Kelley said he and his supporters, who include Reed, have petitioned to go before the Credentials Committee in Chicago with their concerns. However, DNC Chair Harrison may have signaled that door has closed.
In his Aug. 1 letter to Kelley, Harrison wrote, “There are no pending credentials challenges and the window to file challenges has long passed … We look forward to supporting our Presidential and Vice Presidential nominees in Chicago and hope you will join us in working together to support the Democratic Party and our shared successes in November.”
