Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez mentioned Sunday that the party reached out to "barbershops" and "beauty salons" to find African-American voters in Alabama while discussing Doug Jones' upset Senate race victory.
Jones became the first Democrat since 1992 to win a U.S. Senate election in Alabama on Tuesday, and his victory was made possible by getting overwhelming margins of black voters in his victory over Republican Roy Moore.
Perez told MSNBC's Joy Reid one of the lessons he took away from Jones' win was African-American voters were the party's "backbone."
"We have to recognize that, as I said earlier this week, African-American women in particular and African Americans generally are, indeed, the backbone of the Democratic Party, and precisely because they are the backbone of the Democratic Party, we should never take them for granted, and in the past we have," Perez said.
Reid said grassroots organizers did a "bulk" of the work in getting out the vote, and she asked Perez if the DNC was committed to hiring more "consulting firms of color" on the ground in states where Democrats are competing.
Perez said Democrats did that in Alabama, namedropping African-Americans who helped them mobilize black voters.
"In northern Alabama, we had Patrick Grayson, who was working with small businesses, so we were reaching out to barbershops, to beauty salons and other local businesses, because we needed to find the voters where we got them," he said.