Democrat Doug Jones believes he’s got a shot at winning the race for governor, because Alabamians are ready for change. The former U.S. Senator says residents want more transparent government and relief from economic hardship. WBHM’s Richard Banks spoke with Jones about his election strategy and platform, and if Jones will file a lawsuit against Republican opponent Tommy Tuberville, challenging his qualifications to run for governor.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
The Alabama Republican Party dismissed a challenge on June 14 against Tommy Tuberville. The challenge was filed by Ken McFeeters, one of Tuberville’s opponents in the Republican primary for governor. With that dismissal, the party says Senator Tuberville meets the state’s residency requirements and should therefore be allowed to run for Alabama governor. Do you have anything to add to that debate, or perhaps will you file a challenge against Tuberville in the courts?
We're not going to file. I'm not filing one. I think people are completely ignoring the law. Even the challenger who ran as a Republican called that hearing a farce. It was a preordained conclusion. It became more and more obvious that there was some serious evidence out there that shows [Tuberville] doesn't meet the residency requirements. Everybody knows he really spends all his time in Florida. Whether or not that legally fits the bill for residency, I think will remain potentially available for a court.
[His] records don't add up. What his tax returns don't show, we don't know when they were filed. And it’s a real problem when you moved to Alabama in August of 2018, but yet you and your wife vote in Florida just a few months later, in November of 2018. The questions just keep piling up.
Well, let's talk nuts and bolts. Talk about your platform.
Platform is pretty simple. Platform is to open up government, to be more transparent with government, and to try to do everything that the governor can to get prices down so people in this state can afford to live. They can afford a raise a family. They can be a little comfortable and take some vacations. They can pay their power bills. They can find affordable healthcare in this state.
We're gonna do those things necessary. It involves expanding the eligibility for Medicaid on day one and working with the legislature to try to fund it. We've got to connect the dots between Medicaid expansion and rural healthcare, rural communities and the overall health and economy of the state of Alabama.
And you know, the governor can do certain things. The governor can get the insurance commissioner to start looking at the various insurance rates in Alabama and making sure that people are being treated fairly, and they're not being gouged and that people are being paid their claims timely and they are not being denied arbitrarily.
I need to work with the legislature to finally get rid, totally, of the grocery tax. It's unconscionable that Alabama is one of only a few states that taxes the purchase of groceries. We need to get back to a situation that the legislature did a few years ago and not have an income tax on overtime.
Now we're looking at the possibility of less tax revenue and shrinking budgets in the state of Alabama. You've mentioned cutting a couple of taxes that the state has been dependent on for a long time. How will you make up for that income? How will you pay for some of the programs that you're discussing?
No one can tell me that there's still not some waste going on. Just look at the money that we are spending on a prison in Alabama. Originally set to cost about four or five hundred million dollars, but now that one prison is costing $1.2 or $1.3 billion. Our whole tax system is wacky. It is regressive. It puts the burden on poor people.
And by the way, we're not going to be hurting just simply because of a pullback in the economy. Our budgets are gonna be constrained because of the very things that Tommy Tuberville voted on in the United States Senate, what I call the anything but beautiful bill that passed last year. That bill is going to have, I won't say dramatic, but it is gonna have certain negative effects on Alabama and the services that this state is gonna be required to give. We're gonna prioritize people and the services that are essential in a state that is both unhealthy and poor. And we are a poor state, make no mistake about it.
You had suggested that we discuss the recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing Alabama to use an older congressional map in the upcoming election. That map was previously ruled by federal courts to discriminate against black voters. What's on your mind about that?
Well, I think it's a real damn shame, to be honest with you. I mean, we seem to be galloping back to a Jim Crow era, post-reconstruction era of the old Confederacy. And now what happened, you saw a federal court in Birmingham who said that map was drawn to intentionally discriminate on the basis of race. And by the way, the Supreme Court basically said the same thing just three years ago about these same maps.
But now, all of a sudden, everybody has changed their mind, because we're in these gerrymandering wars, and they are denying Black Alabamians the ability to have a voice, at least they think they are. We're going to flip that script. I’ve worked so hard in my career and people have thanked me, for showing that Alabama has made progress, that we have moved forward.
I have been arguing for years that we shouldn't have partisan gerrymandering, that this all should be done by a nonpartisan commission. If I get elected governor, I'm going to ask the state legislature to pass a constitutional amendment that we can vote on.
Your opponent has said you'd open borders, liberalize opportunities for child transgender procedures, and defund the police. What do you say to those charges?
That name kind of name-calling, that kind of crap, that's the only thing he's got. And he has no basis on which to say any of those things. There is nothing in my record, and I do have three years in the U.S. Senate, working across the aisle, getting things done, actually working with a group of bipartisan senators that would have increased border security.
He wants to call names. He wants to divide people. He wants to use what has been so typical in Alabama in the past, with a bunch of demagogues, and that is fear, hate, division. He is not putting forth any programs. He is just criticizing people that need a little bit of assistance in this state, not recognizing that everybody in this state [doesn’t have] a $3 or $4 million beach house that they can go to and live in, and do whatever they want. We have people in this state that are hurting and we're going to address that.
The Democratic Party has folks on the left, folks more towards the middle. How will you work within the party when, in fact, the last time you were in the Senate, you had some critics that said that you were perhaps too conservative on certain issues.
I probably am considered conservative by some people in the party. There's no question about that. You know, look, the Democratic Party is a big tent. I think the problem that we've had in this state in the past is that we tend to want to fight among ourselves and not win elections. And I think that has changed this year. I'm old enough to be a Rolling Stones fan, a big Rolling Stones fan. And so I somewhat ascribe to the Mick Jagger School of Politics, and I try to tell people, you can't always get what you want, but if you try some time, you just might find you get what need.
And I think that more and more of our folks and our followers, that's exactly what we want. I'll listen to anybody. We learn from folks on both sides of the political aisle. We learn about their cares, their concerns, their communities. I can't can always agree, but we can find common ground on so many things in this state, because we all have the same goals and aspirations. The goals are good jobs, good education, an economy that you can work with, good healthcare. It's how you get there, and that's what it takes to be a good leader. A public servant is someone who will listen to all sides.
Well, what's your approach to winning in this deep red state of Alabama, as a Democrat? After all, the last time you ran against Tommy Tuberville, the 2020 Senate race, he won with 60% of the vote.
In that race alone, I got more votes than any Democrat in the history of this state – 920,000 people voted for Doug Jones. That included, by the way, 70,000 that voted for Donald Trump and Doug Jones over Tommy Tuberville.
We're gonna be in every corner of this state, talking about the farmers and how the farmers have been hurting because of the very tariffs that Tommy Tuberville has been supporting. The increases in their diesel and the fertilizer that Tommy Tuberville had been supporting. [We’ll be] giving incentives to small businesses and entrepreneurs so that they can stay in Alabama.
People are looking for change. There's pretty good evidence of that. If you look at the number of folks in the primary on May 19, when Democrats more than doubled the number of votes that were cast in 2022, and Republicans, despite the millions of dollars being spent on some of the worst, just disgusting, TV ads that I have ever seen, they were down 25%. So I think people are ready for that change. And we have seen changes in Alabama before. It is that opportunity that we've got, but we've gotta make our case. And that's what we're gonna be doing from one end of the state to the other.
