page_title: Alabama Democratic Party
section_title: The Post-Wallace era
hierarchical_section_title: Alabama Democratic Party / History of the party / The Post-Wallace era
caption_attribution_description: English: The Alabama Democratic Party State Headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama (United States).
context_page_description: The Alabama Democratic Party is the affiliate of the Democratic Party in the state of Alabama. It is chaired by Christopher J. England.
  Federally, Alabama has not voted for a Democrat for president since Jimmy Carter was the nominee in 1976. In Congress, Democrats hold one out of Alabama's seven seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and hold one of the state's two U.S. Senate seats. The only vice president from Alabama was a Democrat, William Rufus King who ran with Franklin Pierce in 1852. However, King died less than two months into his term.
  In the state legislature, it is now the minority party, having lost control in 2010 after 136 years. Democrats are also the minority party in statewide offices. Of 19 statewide appellate court positions, Democrats only maintained the chief justice of the Supreme Court until Cobb's resignation in 2011.
context_section_description: The final retirement of George Wallace in 1986 opened a bitter struggle for succeeding him between several major figures in the Democratic Party.  It included Lt. Governor Bill Baxley then serving under Wallace fourth term.  He had also served as attorney general under Wallace's second and third terms.  He had been a politically nimble figure who was considered to be both a "new south" southern liberal (he prosecuted the Sixteenth Street Church Bomber) and, yet, was also considered to be a friend and loyalist to Wallace.  He also enjoyed the support of organized labor.  The other major candidate was then retiring Attorney General Charles Graddick who before being elected as a statewide-Democrat, had previously been in the Republican Party.  He was considered to represent the more conservative and business oriented wing of the Democratic party.
  Charles Graddick defeated Bill Baxley in the Democratic runoff by about 8,000 votes.  Baxley appealed his primary loss to the State Democratic Executive Committee on the basis that Graddick had called Republicans to "cross over" and "illegally" participate in the runoff after having voted in the Republican primary several weeks earlier.  Despite no real evidence to support this conclusion, the Party leaders agreed and disqualified Graddick as the nominee.  This forced the leadership to either hold another runoff or chose Baxley as the candidate for the Alabama gubernatorial election of 1986.
  The controversial decision from the party leadership to run Baxley was deemed undemocratic by the electorate, leading to the landslide election of Guy Hunt, the first Republican to win the governor's race since Reconstruction. Including that election, Democrats have lost 8 of the last 9 Governor's races with the only win being in 1998 by Don Siegelman.
  Since 1986, Democrats have lost more and more ground to the Republicans, finally, in 2010, losing control of the Alabama Legislature.
caption: Alabama Democratic Party State Headquarters in Montgomery in 2018
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