By Michael Meneer

My wife and I popped open a bottle of champagne after the election of Democrat Doug Jones to the U.S. Senate from “deep-red” Alabama. Our Yaletown neighbours likely assume we won the lottery with all of the jubilant hollering.

Even in far off Vancouver, the election of a Democrat in Alabama feels cathartic. It is as if we can now begin to accept the results of Trump’s election with a sense of renewed hope in the U.S. electorate.

I had to bounce these sanguine feelings off a fellow Vancouver ex-pat, Cooper Walls, who was born and raised in northern Alabama. Walls and his wife Carol were taking in the VanDusen Garden holiday lights as the returns came in from Alabama. He says they went from despondent to ecstatic in very short order. 

Walls thought the Republican, Roy Moore, would win for sure. After all, this is Alabama, a state that has not had a Democrat in the U.S. Senate in a generation and the ultimate embodiment of the lingering effects of slavery. It was Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, who in his 1963 inaugural speech infamously called for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”

Walls says he himself was an “old school Republican” until the party veered right with its focus on social issues and “family values”. He recalls visits back to Alabama and seeing billboards with messages like, “If you aren't Christian you are going to Hell.”

Walls says he did not leave the Republican Party; it left him. Since then, he has come a long way geographically by moving to Canada, as well as politically, as evidenced by his support for Bernie Sanders in 2016.

Walls says Sanders represented a wake-up call that the Democratic Party missed, and in many ways it’s the same wake-up call embodied in the rhetoric of Roy Moore who repeatedly slammed the political establishment in Washington, D.C.

Listening to Walls, I realize that my Alabama-inspired jubilation needs to be tempered.

Walls says, “People in the United States, including us who live abroad, feel disenfranchised by the political establishment on both sides of the aisle. The Democrats need to quit acting like an ‘old boys club’ too with restrictions that keep the hierarchy of the party in control.”

The new book by long-time Democratic Party operative Donna Brazile confirms Walls’s point with the acknowledgment that the Democratic Party was undemocratically co-opted by the Hillary Clinton campaign a full year before the party officially nominated her.

Still, there are signs that the Democratic Party is embracing the catharsis that Walls says is needed.

The party is coming to terms with the fact that its process to select presidential nominees is deeply flawed. A blue-ribbon commission equally divided between Clinton and Sanders supporters is due to make reform recommendations in January.

The commission is considering several important changes, including reducing the over-size power of party elites, known as super delegates. There will also likely be a recommendation to involve new and unaffiliated voters by encouraging state Democratic parties with restrictive primary-election rules to open up registration processes. This should make it easier for voters like the young people who supercharged the Sanders campaign to register and vote more readily in future Democratic primary elections.

The catharsis within the Democratic Party is also happening in Canada. I served on the elections committee for Democrats Abroad Vancouver earlier this year and watched firsthand as our coordinating committee elected a new cadre of leaders inspired by Sanders. The same thing happened at the country level with Democrats Abroad Canada. This process was deeply contentious with a clear alignment of candidates into Hillary and Bernie camps, and the distrust that some Sanders-aligned candidates felt for the process was palpable.

It has been a true annus horribilis as an American Democrat living abroad, especially having to explain daily, "What went wrong" and “Who are these Trump voters?”

American expat and native Alabamian Cooper Walls reminds me how far the United States still needs to go. In many ways the election in Alabama mirrored the Clinton-Trump election result: a nearly 50/50 split of the electorate with race, education, and urban-rural divides still so stark.

As Walls so aptly puts it: "We have got to get past this partisan bickering before we can move forward. It won’t happen with the current politicians.”

Michael Meneer is an American expat living in Vancouver and the Democratic half of the American Panel on CBC’s Early Edition with Rick Cluff.