A competitive race in a racially gerrymandered district could decide the House majority.
A competitive race in a racially gerrymandered Alabama district could decide the House majority.
C aroleene Dobson is trying to do something nobody has done in quite a long time: Win a closely contested House race in Alabama. She will have to overcome the strong national financial backing of her Democratic opponent, Shomari Figures, to pull it off. Given the margins in the House and the fact that this seat represents a potential pickup for Democrats, it’s possible that this race could decide the majority. I caught up with Dobson on Tuesday before she headed out to campaign with Alabama congressman Gary Palmer.
The Mandatory District
Alabama’s second congressional district, in which Dobson is running, shouldn’t even exist, but the Supreme Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan (2023) that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act required Alabama to redraw its seven-district congressional map to create two majority-black districts in the state. This required deliberate racial gerrymandering, made more challenging by the fact that there’s no natural map which would produce two solid black-majority districts in a state where African Americans make up just 26.6 percent of the population and none of the majority-black cities (the largest being Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile) is big enough to make up even a third of a single House district.
Under the previous map, Democrat Terri Sewell won reelection in the majority-black seventh district in 2022 with 63.6 percent of the vote, and the six Republicans all won by even wider margins. In fact, with only one exception, the winner of every Alabama House race between 2012 and 2022 took at least 60 percent of the vote. The sole exception was the result of a protest vote in 2016 against Martha Roby, who had withdrawn her endorsement of Donald Trump after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, when angry Trump supporters limited her to 48.8 percent of the vote. But even then, Roby’s opponent topped out at 40.5 percent. There hasn’t been a truly competitive House race in Alabama since Roby ousted incumbent Bobby Bright in 2010, the year the state finally shook off the last vestiges of its post-Reconstruction hostility to Republicans.
This time, it’s a real race. The second district was completely redrawn in October 2023, with Republican incumbent Barry Moore relocated to the first district, leaving behind an open seat. The district no longer covers the state’s southern border with the Florida panhandle, but now reaches its western border with Mississippi. The resulting district, which stretches to incorporate parts of both Mobile and Montgomery, contains a lot of rural and small-town communities.
State data indicate that the district is 42.2 percent white, and thus qualifies as “majority-minority,” but is 49.2 percent black. Among the voting-age population, it’s 47.6 percent black and 45 percent white. It’s politically divided enough that, in 2022, incumbent Republican governor Kay Ivey carried the district (that is, within its current boundaries) 49.3 percent to 47.6 percent, but Katie Boyd Britt lost the district 48.8 percent to 49.3 percent in her successful Senate bid. In the March primary, turnout for the two parties was nearly identical: 57,520 Democrats and 57,055 Republicans. In the April runoff, however, there were 35,968 Democrats but just 25,176 Republicans.
The Matchup
Both parties have nominated first-time candidates in their thirties who defeated a crowded primary field. Both Dobson and Figures are also native Alabamians who worked outside the state for some years. But their backgrounds present contrasts beyond the obvious demographic ones (Dobson is white and female, while Figures is black and male).
Dobson “grew up working on her family’s cattle farm and competed in the National High School Finals Rodeo as a teen.” She’s still active in rodeo, serving on the board of the Southeastern Livestock Exposition. Her father is in the Alabama Livestock Hall of Fame. Boots are a signature part of Dobson’s look.
She attended Harvard and Baylor Law School and practiced law in Texas before returning home in 2019 to start a family. Aside from her one area of government service, as part of the Alabama Forestry Commission, she represents private clients in energy and natural-resources law and commercial-finance law. Little known before the primary, in which she parlayed a second-place finish with 26.5 percent of the vote in an eight-candidate field into a 17-point runoff victory over a former state senator, she represents the Republican electorate’s taste for candidates from the private sector.
Figures, by contrast, is politics all the way down. The son of two Alabama state senators, he went to college and law school at the University of Alabama but then set his sights on D.C. After clerking for a Missouri federal judge and working as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Ohio in 2012, he spent his whole adult career in Washington, D.C. He worked for the Obama White House, for Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, and, as chief of staff, for Merrick Garland. On Monday, he was campaigning with Eric Holder.
Figures’s wife, who is from the New York suburbs, also worked in the Obama White House; when they got married in New Jersey, she was studying for a Ph.D. in sociology at Yale. Figures owns a home in Greenbelt, Md., only claimed Alabama residency after the new district was drawn in October 2023, and leased an apartment in the district two days before the filing deadline.
Figures is thus a national progressive rather than the sort of local and more moderate Southern Democrat he beat in his own primary. In the Democratic runoff, Figures defeated the minority leader of the Alabama house of representatives. Figures was heavily bankrolled in that race by cryptocurrency interests. Dobson, by contrast, cites her endorsements from deeply rooted local industry groups such as farmers, manufacturers, builders, and foresters.
Figures is campaigning largely on getting the federal government to pressure Alabama to join Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid and enacting a federal law to legalize abortion. In debating Dobson, he criticized Alabama’s Republican government for allowing concealed carry, downplayed concerns about immigration as “fearmongering,” and defended Biden’s record on the economy: “This administration has done very good work — very good work — in making sure that we did not fall off of a fiscal cliff into a depression or a recession. . . . We’re seeing the product of that now. We’re seeing strong job reports. We’re seeing the stock market performing at all-time highs.”
Dobson, by contrast, is a solid social conservative active in the Federalist Society. The issues section of her website stresses her support for the Second Amendment and her pro-life commitments: “As a lifelong Christian, conservative, wife, and mother, I am pro-life and will fight for the rights of the unborn, as well as protect the sanctity of marriage between one man and one woman. Standing up for the unborn also means making sure they have the opportunity to succeed. Starting from conception, every child deserves the chance to fulfill their potential and contribute positively to our society.”
But the main thrust of Dobson’s campaign isn’t social issues, it’s the economy and the border crisis. Her most widely broadcast ad shows her loading her pickup truck with groceries and talking about prices:
The Candidate’s Perspective
If voters in the second district are hostile to a white Republican running in a court-mandated black racial enclave, Dobson hasn’t seen it. She tells me that the biggest surprise in running for office as a first-time candidate has been the graciousness of voters and their willingness to hear her out even though she’s new at this and isn’t a natural extrovert. She chalks that up partly to Alabama hospitality and partly to being a fresh face in a polarized time when people are not favorably disposed towards politicians.
The biggest concerns she hears about from voters, she says, are sticker shock from prices, the fentanyl epidemic, and worries about how the migrant crisis could destabilize small towns, as it has in Alabama communities on the borders of the district. Many small-town communities have shoestring budgets and limited resources that can’t handle the strain of a sudden influx of penniless migrants who need social services. She embraces Ivey’s warnings of a humanitarian crisis if more migrants are sent to small Alabama towns, and she cites local news: a sex-trafficking ring in Montgomery, a series of fentanyl overdoses in Semmes, a town of just 5,500 people. I hear the same theme from her that I heard from Iowa governor Kim Reynolds last summer: The interstate highways bring the drug traffic, in this case I-10 and I-65.
Biden-era inflation is Dobson’s favorite theme, and she reels off numbers: Forty-five percent of Alabama families are struggling to pay their bills, a third of credit-card users in the area are delinquent on their balances, and farms are facing a 40 percent hike in fertilizer prices driven by energy costs.
With so much national attention on abortion and IVF — the latter triggered by an Alabama supreme court decision that was rapidly overturned by the state’s Republican legislature — I ask about how a pro-life conservative is navigating the issues. While emphasizing that the abortion issue belongs with the state legislature, she affirms that she’s against any federal funding for abortion, while Democrats overwhelmingly back it for all nine months of pregnancy. But on IVF, she applauds the state legislature, pledges to push pro-IVF legislation in the House to match the Senate bill backed by Britt and Ted Cruz, and she blames the Democrats for “fearmongering” around the issue instead of working across the aisle.
The Polls and the Money Race
As with many House races, the Alabama second district has been lightly polled, and much of the final outcome will turn on how presidential turnout shapes the electorate. A recent Montgomery Research poll showed Dobson trailing Figures 50.1 percent to 45.5 percent, with Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump 51.7 percent to 46.4 percent in the district. That’s not ideal, but it’s within the margin of error and shows significant progress from earlier polls: “A recent poll from Schoen Cooperman Research, conducted for the Democrat’s Protect Progress on October 14-17 of 400 likely voters showed Figures with a 49% to 38% lead over Dobson. Also, an Impact Research poll conducted for the SPLC Action Fund in late July and early August gave Figures a 51% to 39% lead over Dobson.”
If Dobson closes strongly and the winds favor the Republican ticket — she tells me that, as is true in many places, a lot will depend on turnout from Republican-leaning voters who don’t often show up at the polls — it’s not hard to envision her pulling this off, perhaps by a hair.
Dobson has outraised Figures, $3.18 million to $2.17 million, and she has the support of the NRCC, which put her on its list of 35 “Young Gun” candidates, and of Elise Stefanik’s EPAC list of eight female Republican candidates. But Figures closed ground on her with a Martha’s Vineyard fundraiser with Barack Obama, and national left-wing money is leaning hard into this district, as it is in so many places. The DCCC recently announced a $750,000 closing-week media buy. Dobson will need all the help and luck she can get.