Why Democrats are snubbing their Alabama Senate candidate

Doug Jones would seem to be a perfect candidate for the post-Charlottesville moment.

By GABRIEL DEBENEDETTI 09/01/2017 04:57 AM EDT

He’s cash-poor, outgunned and flying under the radar. Doug Jones, the Democrat running in the Alabama special election for Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ old Senate seat, is no Jon Ossoff.

Unlike Ossoff, the Georgia special election candidate who recently gained national prominence — and collected more cash than any House candidate, ever — due to his initial positioning as the face of the anti-Trump resistance, Jones has declined to make his opposition to Donald Trump the centerpiece of his campaign.

It’s proved to be a consequential decision in a party where antipathy toward the president is an animating force. While Jones would seem to be a perfect candidate for the post-Charlottesville moment — he’s a 63-year-old former U.S. attorney who prosecuted the pair behind the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham — national Democrats have largely ignored him. And grassroots donors have given him the cold shoulder, leaving Jones with less than $100,000 in cash on hand by the end of July, according to federal filings.

“This election should not be about Donald Trump. He is popular in a lot of places, but he is also widely unpopular [among some] people that are going to vote,” Jones said in an interview, insisting his campaign is focused on civil rights, health care, and wages — not the president. “I don’t really have to talk about Donald Trump, [though] sometimes it’s just impossible not to, given some of the noise that went out of the White House these days."

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http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/01/alabama-senate-democrats-doug-jones-242232