Away from the presidential battleground states that are claiming most of both parties’ attention, a redrawn House district in ruby-red Alabama could prove crucial to their ambitions in Washington.
Formerly a safe G.O.P. seat, the Second Congressional District is now highly competitive. For Republicans, holding it would help protect their razor-thin majority in the House. For Democrats, it offers a rare opportunity to flip a seat in the Deep South.
“Alabama is not a battleground, but this seat is,” said Representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas, a rising Democratic star who joined a panel of prominent Black women on Sunday in a church in Montgomery, Ala.
“A lot of people will try to pretend as if you don’t matter,” she told the audience. “But you do.”
The new competitiveness of the district is a direct consequence of intervention by the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, to recognize that Alabama had illegally diluted the power of Black voters.
And the contest there between Shomari Figures, a Democrat and former Justice Department official, and Caroleene Dobson, a real estate lawyer and Republican newcomer, will offer the first glimpse of what fair congressional representation could look like in Alabama.
For Black voters, it is a hard-earned moment of empowerment, and the result of years of litigation.
“This year, it’s different — to know that I’m part of something that’s for the history books,” said Dr. Marcus Caster, one of the Black voters who first challenged the legitimacy of the former district map. “Going to the polls on Tuesday is just going to be historic, and it’s one that holds a lot of weight and value in my heart.”
LaKeisha Chestnut, another voter involved in the litigation over the map, said she had seen a difference among her neighbors in Mobile: Now, she said, “they’re not cynical about voting.”
More than a third of Alabama’s voting-age population is Black, but only one of the state’s seven districts is now represented by a Black lawmaker, Representative Terri Sewell, a Democrat.
If Mr. Figures wins and Ms. Sewell retains her seat, it would be the first time that Alabama had two Black lawmakers representing the state in Washington at the same time. (Ms. Dobson, the Republican, is white.)
Black voters are “seeing it as a vindication of their long denied rights, and I think rightly so,” said Eric Holder, the former Obama administration attorney general, who has family ties to the district and spent Monday rallying voters in Mobile. Participation in the district’s primary earlier this year, he noted, more than double compared with the previous election under the old map.
While preserving most of Ms. Sewell’s adjoining majority-Black Seventh District as it was, the new map increases the percentage of Black voters in the Second District to 48.7 percent, up from about 30 percent. The sprawling district now stretches for hundreds of miles, encompassing; Montgomery, the state capital; a number of counties in the rural Black Belt, where slaves once farmed crops in the region’s rich and fertile soil, and most of Mobile on the Gulf Coast.
Campaigning in the district has at times been secondary to simply informing voters about which district they now live in.
“I think people aren’t going to know until Nov. 5, if you don’t follow politics closely,” said Stephanie Moseley, a friend and supporter of Ms. Dobson. “I really expected it to be more visible,” she said of the race. “It could flip Congress.”
Ms. Dobson was a surprise victor in a crowded Republican primary, but she quickly shored up backing from the conservative establishment. She was named to the House Republican campaign arm’s “Young Guns” mentor and support program, and received support from House leaders including Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who has worked to elect more young conservative women.
Her campaign has emphasized support for former President Donald J. Trump’s hard-line immigration goals and economic agenda. Ms. Dobson has expressed support for fertility treatments, in a state whose Supreme Court has declared embryos fertilized in vitro to be children. And she joined other Republicans in opposing transition care for transgender youth.
Mr. Figures, who moved back to Alabama to run for the seat, has argued that his experience in Washington gives him an advantage in delivering for the district. He has aligned himself with foundational Democratic policies like expanding access to health care in the state.
Voting in Alabama tends to polarize along racial lines, and most of the state’s Black voters have historically backed Democratic candidates, so the new boundaries have made the district much more competitive for Democrats.
Both Mr. Figures and Ms. Dobson have raised millions of dollars in campaign contributions, more than twice what the previous representative raised.
Given that neither Mr. Figures or Ms. Dobson has won elective office in Alabama before, both are leaning heavily on their families’ history in the state.
Ms. Dobson speaks of the five generations of her family who have lived in Alabama, primarily in a rural part of the district.
“Look at who’s actually living here, working here, understands and sees on a firsthand basis, daily, the struggles that not just the people here in Montgomery and Mobile face, but also those in rural communities,” Ms. Dobson said in October. “My opponent has never lived in a rural, or worked in a rural, community.”
Mr. Figures has sought to weave together the district’s civil rights legacy with that of his own family, invoking the work of his father, Michael Figures, a renowned civil rights lawyer and state senator, and his mother, Vivian Davis Figures, who succeeded her husband in the State Senate.
“We’ve got an opportunity here to put a cherry on top of the work that started 70 years ago in places like Montgomery,” Mr. Figures said on Sunday, standing in the Baptist church alongside Ms. Crockett and Ms. Sewell.
“You learn very early on when you grow up here, whether you’re Black or white, the role that federal government has had to play in making this state, in particular, do right by people,” he added. “And that’s what motivated me.”
Mr. Figures’s campaign has not gone unnoticed by Black Democrats outside Alabama. Hakeem Jeffries, who is vying to become the first Black speaker of the House, made an appearance in Montgomery this week on his behalf.
But the longevity of the district in its current form is not certain. It was drawn by an independent special independent master after Republican lawmakers, loath to pit two of their incumbents against each other, drafted a map that did not satisfy the mandate to empower Black voters.
A trial to determine the map for the remainder of the decade is set for early February.
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