Doug Jones

Gordon Douglas Jones (born May 4, 1954) is an American attorney, lobbyist, and politician who served as a United States Senator from Alabama from 2018 to 2021. A Democrat, he was the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997 to 2001. Jones was born in Fairfield, Alabama, and is a graduate of the University of Alabama and Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. After law school, he worked as a congressional staffer and as a federal prosecutor before moving to private practice. In 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Jones's most prominent cases were the successful prosecution of two Ku Klux Klan members for the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four African-American girls and the indictment of domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph. He returned to private practice at the conclusion of Clinton's presidency in 2001. Jones announced his candidacy for United States Senate in the 2017 special election following the resignation of Republican incumbent Jeff Sessions to become U.S. Attorney General. After winning the Democratic primary in August, he faced former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore in the general election. Jones was considered a long-shot candidate in a deeply Republican state. A month before the election, Moore was alleged to have sexually assaulted and otherwise acted inappropriately with several women, including some who were minors at the time.[1] Jones won the special election by 22,000 votes, 50%–48%.[2] At the time, Jones was the only statewide elected Democrat in Alabama and the first Democrat to win statewide office since Lucy Baxley was elected President of the Alabama Public Service Commission in 2008. Democrats had not represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate since 1997, when Howell Heflin left office. Jones was considered a moderate Democrat who demonstrated a willingness to work with Republicans and split with his party on certain issues.[3] Jones ran for a full term in 2020 and lost to Republican nominee Tommy Tuberville by a wide margin.[4] In January 2021, he joined CNN as a political commentator.[5] Jones was a GU Politics Fellow at the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service during the spring 2021 academic semester.[6]