When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s congressional map last year as an illegal dilution of Black voting power, the decision set in motion a heated redistricting battle.
Now, voters on Tuesday will head to the polls for the first time in a newly reshaped Second Congressional District, which was redrawn to give Black voters a fair opportunity to elect a representative of their choice.
The shake-up has drawn a field of nearly two dozen candidates, underscoring the rare political opportunity on offer: a primary without an incumbent, and because Black voters historically favor Democrats, a suddenly competitive race in ruby-red Alabama.
“If not now, I think I’ll be 60 before something else comes up,” said one of the Democratic candidates, State Representative Jeremy Gray, 38, as he stood near the waterworks in Prichard, Ala., trying to catch voters on their way to pay their monthly water bills.
The race is also a test of what fair representation means in a state that has repeatedly provoked federal intervention by disregarding civil and voting rights laws. On top of persuading people to come out and vote, Mr. Gray said, “it’s a lot of education when it comes to what actually happened.”
Candidates and their allies have scrambled to campaign, and to ensure that thousands of constituents are aware that they live in the newly drawn district. They have enlisted family members, tapped into networks of sorority sisters and lined the hundreds of miles of roads between Mobile and Montgomery with campaign signs.
The new congressional map was drawn by an independent special master after a federal court found that the Republican-dominated legislature had failed to draw fair boundaries. Though Black people make up more than a quarter of the state’s voting-age population, only one Black lawmaker, Representative Terri Sewell, a Democrat, currently represents Alabama in the U.S. House, alongside six white men.
The district now cuts across the state for hundreds of miles, stretching from the state’s border with Mississippi to its border with Georgia. It takes in much of the seaport city of Mobile; the state capital, Montgomery; and some rural counties in the Black Belt, with its rich, fertile soil and cotton fields that were once worked by slaves. About 49 percent of the district’s voters are Black, up from about 30 percent before the boundaries were redrawn.
The new map offers Alabama a chance to send two Black representatives to Washington for the first time in its history, and to help determine control of the House of Representatives, which hinges on a razor-thin Republican majority.
“We fought to get this seat,” said State Representative Juandalynn Givan, a Democrat from the Birmingham area who is running in the primary. Speaking to about a dozen women in a Montgomery boutique, a few feet from a statue of Rosa Parks, she said the redistricting process showed that “you deserve to vote or possibly elect someone that looks like you.”
That significance is not lost in the heated competition for the Democratic nomination. Candidates have spent much of their time reflecting on their lives as the descendants of sharecroppers or impoverished families in rural counties, surrounded by memories of and monuments to the Civil Rights movement.
“Every part of my career that I’ve had to this point is attributable to the people in places and schools in this district,” said Shomari Figures, who moved back to Mobile to run for the seat after working in Washington for the Justice Department. The son of Michael Figures, a state senator and renowned civil rights lawyer who died in 1996, and his wife Vivian Davis Figures, who succeeded him in the State Senate, Mr. Figures has emphasized his family’s service in the district and state.
The Democratic candidates are largely aligned on issues like protecting abortion and I.V.F. access, expanding Medicaid and improving education and resources for rural communities, so they have instead been sparring over their experience, their fund-raising donors, and the strength of their ties to the district. (Legally, candidates do not need to live in the district in order to represent it, and several of the candidates in the primary live elsewhere, though they have pledged to move to the district if elected.)
“I live in Huntsville, but I’m the minority leader for the entire state of Alabama,” said State Representative Anthony Daniels, the top Democrat in the State House, whose residence far from the district has been a clear target of criticism by his opponents. “So I’m doing work for the entire state of Alabama.”
The jousting has become particularly tense among the leading candidates in the Democratic primary, a group that includes Mr. Daniels; Mr. Figures, who has faced scrutiny over hundreds of thousands of dollars in support he received from a cryptocurrency super PAC; and State Representative Napoleon Bracy Jr., who secured the endorsement of the influential Alabama Democratic Conference, which has historically represented Black Democrats.
“People should be able to run on their own merits and talk about what they’ve done, and not just try to buy the race,” said Mr. Bracy, who has long represented much of the Mobile area in the State House. He added: “I’ve been on the front line. I understand exactly what the community needs.”
Republicans, for their part, are still eyeing the possibility that they might hold onto the seat. (The current representative, Barry Moore, a Republican, is challenging Representative Jerry Carl in a neighboring district, rather than run for re-election in the redrawn Second District.) Leading candidates in the Republican primary field include State Senator Greg Albritton of Atmore, who chairs the powerful budget committee; former State Senator Dick Brewbaker of Montgomery; and Caroleene Dobson, a real estate lawyer who has campaigned on her ties to the agriculture industry.
“If you look at past election history, a Republican that has a record of being able to work with Democrats can win this seat,” Mr. Brewbaker said in an interview.
Mr. Albritton, eating chips and salsa in a Mobile restaurant last week, acknowledged that he still thought the district’s new boundaries had been “drawn by the wrong people for the wrong reasons.” But, he added, he is running for the seat anyway, out of concern for the economic stability of Mobile and a belief that he could represent the interests of everyone in the district.”
National groups have largely stayed out of the race so far, and a runoff election is expected to be needed next month. With a poll that was conducted in late December showing that nearly half of the 450 likely Democratic voters who were surveyed were undecided, candidates still see plenty of opportunity to break through.
On Saturday, State Senator Merika Coleman and a group of Tuskegee and Alabama State University college students were combing through a neighborhood in Montgomery to introduce themselves and make sure that people were aware of the upcoming election.
“Right now is the time to make sure that we get a nominee with some fire and some passion that is going to excite people for November,” Ms. Coleman said. “Because this is not a given seat.”
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