Doug Jones: ‘A Lot of People’ in Alabama Will Agree With Conviction Vote

Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 3, 2018. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.), who represents a deep red state, said numerous voters in Alabama will agree with his vote to convict President Donald Trump on impeachment charges.

Jones, who won his seat in 2017 following a close race with controversial Republican candidate Roy Moore, is up for reelection in 2020. He took the seat that was vacated by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Republican.

But he said that his vote on impeachment didn’t factor into whether he believes it would get him elected.

“People in Alabama want somebody who they believe is sincere. They’re not going to agree with everything I do,” Jones remarked on MSNBC. “There’s a lot of people in the state that are not going to agree with this, but I’ve got to tell you, Lawrence, there’s going to be a lot of people that did. There’s a lot of people in the state of Alabama who are not happy with the way things are, and they’re not happy with this particular president.”

Trump overwhelmingly carried Alabama in 2016 by a 28-point advantage over Hillary Clinton. Since he was elected, Jones has been seen as especially vulnerable in the Senate.

According to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, following Jones’s vote to impeach, the Alabama Senate race “is moving away from Jones, no matter what he does, solely on the fundamentals would have been the same had he voted to acquit Trump.”

But in the MSNBC interview, the freshman senator said he doesn’t believe Alabama voters will mind when they cast their ballots in November.

“I think people are going to be looking at our votes as votes of conscience. You know, people in Alabama are people of faith. People of Alabama are people of conviction. And they like people that have a conscience, that do what they believe is the right thing, even if they don’t always agree with it,” Jones remarked.

No Democratic senators voted to acquit Trump on either charge of abuse of power or obstruction of Congress. And one member of the GOP, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), voted to convict the president on abuse of power but rejected the obstruction of Congress charge.

On Tuesday, Trump had avoided mentioning impeachment in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night but instead touted the U.S. economy and a number of new initiatives.

“People should be held accountable. The Democrats should be held accountable,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told Fox News. “People need to understand what the Democrats did was dishonest and it was corrupt.”