Alabama Democrats say they now have chairs in all 67 state counties

Reilly McDerment, the newly appointed Democratic county chair for Blount County, has his work cut out for him.

President Donald Trump, a Republican, got over 90% of the vote in the county last year. Only three counties — Marion, Winston and Cleburne — supported Trump by a larger margin.

Two years earlier, the county gave Republican U.S. Sen. Katie Britt 90% of the vote. U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer, R-Hoover, won with nearly 95%. On a state level, Rep. David Standridge, R-Hayden; former Rep. Randall Shedd, R-Fairview; former Sen. Clay Scofield, R-Arab; Sen. Wes Kitchens, R-Arab, and Sen. Shay Shelnutt, R-Trussville, all have won elections to represent parts of the county unopposed since at least 2012.

“Blount County is a very particular county,” McDerment said in an interview. “We were one of the most Trump-ian counties in the last election.”

But McDerment’s appointment also represents a significant achievement for Alabama’s Democratic Party: the establishment of a county chair in each of the state’s 67 counties. It’s a milestone for a party that has faced challenges with disorganization at the local and state levels.

“I hope and believe that people will be fed up, because there’s a lot of goodness in people around here, and we just have to give them an option, because currently they don’t have one,” McDerment said.

The effort to organize began after the election of Randy Kelly as state party chair and Ben Harris as vice chair for county affairs in 2022. Harris, who also serves as a Mobile County chair, said they wanted a chair in every county in Alabama so that they can start electing Democrats on a local level. He said that “this is a long-term strategy and a long-term effort, and it’s a part of building the party.”

“It’s a matter of building kind of brick by brick, day by day, and we’re going to do it,” Harris said.

Susan McKenney, chair of the Alabama Democratic County Chairs’ Association and chair for Marshall County, said that local organization and having Democrats running in local races is critical. She said the association has been working on this initiative for three and a half years, recruiting, training the county chairs and ensuring that all chairs are aware of their duties and how to perform them.

“The counties are the most important part of the puzzle here. This is where the rubber meets the road,” McKenney said.

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For years, the party’s grassroots efforts have been described as fragmented. U.S. Army veteran Linda Turner, the chair for Houston County, remembered attending Democratic meetings “where all (she) heard was how bad the state party was and how unorganized it was. Everybody was waiting for somebody else to do the work.”

She said that before the efforts to establish a chair in every county, organizing happened only in the more populated cities like Huntsville, Mobile and Birmingham, and “everybody else was twisting their thumb because there nobody knew where to go or what to say.”

Turner said that while Georgia’s county party organization took 10 years to activate all its counties, partly due to having over 100 counties, the effort to organize the association in Alabama was due to having a “void” in the state party, leaving “people want(ing) to know where the Democratic Party was.”

“It was something that needed to happen,” she said. “Because we really hadn’t had a Democratic county party in every county in probably decades.”

For McDerment, the decision to get involved stemmed from a deep concern for fundamental rights being stripped from immigrants, adding that “if you strip due process from one group of people in this country, and due process is the method by which you determine whether or not someone’s even a citizen, then you don’t have due process for anybody in this country.”

“We’re treating people poorly and we’re dismantling the legal foundation of this country,” he said. “You can’t call people off, put them in a camp – just snatch them off the streets. That’s Nazi stuff.”

Harris said that county chairs will be building out the party’s infrastructure from the bottom-up. They are providing training sessions for chairs in different regions of the state, teaching them how to recruit candidates, how to fundraise and to discuss strategies that work best in their counties.

“Our county party leaders are out in the community. They’re out at events that are important in the community. They’re involved in recruiting candidates. They’re going to city council meetings and school board meetings and county commission meetings where issues are that are important or being argued, and they’re meeting people who are interested in those things,” Harris said.

McDerment, who has not been involved in politics prior to becoming county chair, said that the current political climate energized him to to get involved, saying that his motivation “is a sign of how things are right now,” and he believes that people might start to change their minds once they see the effects of Trump’s tariffs and policy on immigration on a local level.

“I believe in my heart of hearts that people can be motivated to change their minds when they’re confronted with something that just doesn’t work, and in this case, randomly tariffing imports from all of our greatest economic partners is not something that ever worked,” McDerment.