After the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama’s Second Congressional District had to be redrawn due to concerns that the state’s Republican Party had diluted the voting power of Black residents there, a spirited contest is now taking shape in the district that includes Tuskegee, the home of venerable HBCU Tuskegee College.
According to the Associated Press, Democrat Shomari Figures, a former top aide to Attorney General Merrick Garland and a member of the Obama White House staff, and Republican Caroleene Dobson, a real estate attorney and newcomer to the political scene, are battling for the congressional district’s seat.
Although the district leans Democratic, Republicans familiar with the contest say that the race is actually going to be a battle. According to the non-partisan Cook Report, the district is listed as one that is likely Democratic.
Figures and Dobson are both lawyers under the age of 40 with young children and Alabama natives who spent some time away from the state before returning. That’s where the similarities end for the candidates.
Figures is running a largely progressive platform and has recently called for Alabama to expand Medicaid, for the state to adequately support public education, for investment in a flagging infrastructure system, and has cited a need for an effort to keep Alabama’s hospitals from closing.
Dobson, who has identified herself as a Trump Republican, has positions that closely align with the former president. She has a flair for tying immigration and crime together, just as Trump does at every opportunity.
According to the Alabama Reflector, Figures has focused his race squarely on issues inside Alabama’s borders.
“This race has always been about the people and places that call our community home,” Figures said in a statement released to the outlet shortly after he won the runoff election in April. “It’s about our teachers, public service workers, people in uniform, our seniors, and the children of our district. To all of those who have placed their trust and confidence in me, thank you. Now, we move forward with a unified party and mission to win in November.”
Figures also said in April that he wanted to help teachers in Alabama, “We have teachers here that devote their lives, their time, their energy, their hearts and their careers, to educating the future workers of this state, and we have not been there for our teachers in the way that we need to be.”
In the statement, he turned his attention toward rural areas and poverty.
“To many of our communities in this district, they just don’t have that luxury and so those communities need the federal government to be there for them and so that’s what I want to focus on,” Figures said. “The poverty conditions faced by a kid in Castleberry, Alabama, is different than what it looks like for a kid in Montgomery, Alabama, or Mobile, Alabama. We can’t just suck the resources, the beneficial resources out of our rural communities without reinvesting in those communities to make them more economically viable and addressing their unique challenges as a whole.”
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