Shamori Figures Wins Congressional Seat in Alabama Part of the Blue Wave

Shomari Figures is running for a congressional seat, marking another last-minute surprise. Surprise: And he wins… Updated.

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and former Montana Senator Jon Tester traveled to Alabama on Tuesday, October 20, about two weeks before the midterm elections, to campaign in one of the country's most unexpected battleground districts. They traveled to Dothan, Alabama, the "peanut capital of the world," which is located in Houston County. In 2024, Donald Trump won 73 percent of the vote in the district. After the Supreme Court dismantled the Voting Rights Act this spring, Republicans redrew the state's second congressional district to oust first-term Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures. Now, it is a part of the district.

The election of Figures in 2024 marked the first time that Alabama had two Black members of Congress. However, the Louisiana v. Callais decision resulted in the Republican Party removing Figures' hometown of Mobile, as well as several Black Belt counties, from the district. To dilute Black voting power and make the seat red, they incorporated the overwhelmingly white and rural Wiregrass region in the southeast of the state, which includes Houston County.

However, the circumstances have not unfolded as anticipated. At noon on Thursday, a former industrial building downtown was filled to capacity with a standing-room-only crowd of 400 to 500 individuals who were rallying for Figures. When Figures entered the stage, he exclaimed, "Oh my God." "When was the last time you attended a rally of this nature in Dothan?"

“Never!” yelled members of the crowd.

“When they gave me the Wiregrass,” Figures said, “they did not know that the Wiregrass looked like this.”

The rally in Dothan was more reminiscent of a church revival service than a typical weekday campaign event, and Democratic candidates rarely campaign in such locations. When Booker entered the stage, Tester led the audience in a boisterous "Shomari! Figures!" chant and chest-pumped him. Booker jokingly referred to Figures as his "stunt double," in reference to the fact that he is bald, like the New Jersey senator, but is 16 years younger.

Figure 41 is young and energetic, with four children under the age of eight. His wife, whom he met when they both worked in the Obama White House, sat in the front row with their three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son, next to his mom, Vivian, a state senator who plays grandma and political consigliere in one on the campaign trail. His seat had been aggressively targeted by Republicans, recalled figures. “They grabbed a pen; they cut it up,” he said. They created some communities of people who look like me. I tried to build more communities of people who aren’t like me. Then they said, We did it for the politics.”

The mostly Black crowd laughed and hooted. “But what they didn’t know is that in doing that, it doesn’t matter what your district lines look like when people are paying $4 a gallon for gas,” Figures said. It doesn't matter what your district lines look like when farmers are paying all-time high prices for diesel fuel. “It doesn’t matter how many farmers you put in the district when all those farmers are paying all-time high prices for fertilizer because a president wants to start a war in Iran.”

Afterward, locals said it was the largest Democratic event they’d seen in the area in decades. “I was born and raised in Dothan, Alabama,” says Letitia Daniels-Jackson, a community organizer who is running to become the first Black woman on the Houston County Commission. “I have never seen a rally with this much excitement and this kind of crowd, ever. This was historic for Dothan, Alabama. The event has fired people up.”

Both sides agree that what was supposed to be a safe Republican pickup is now a coin flip. Figures are counting on anger over the Callais ruling to drive Democrats, especially Black voters, to the polls even in deep-red areas like Dothan, while frustration over the rising cost of everything will keep traditionally Republican voters home. “On the ground, we’re seeing and feeling that people are upset, and the data backs that up,” Figures told me in an interview before the rally.

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act was supposed to turbocharge Republican redistricting efforts—and it still might in the long-term—but in the short-term it is fueling increased turnout from Black voters, much like the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade motivated women voters during the last midterm election. The pollster Terrence Woodbury calls it a “Blacklash.”

When Alabama held its congressional primaries weeks after the Callais decision, turnout rose by 10 points in Montgomery—the district’s Democratic stronghold and Figures’ new hometown—compared to 2022 and was 7 points higher than the statewide average. Alabama doesn’t have early voting, so we won’t know until Nov. 3 what the ultimate impact of a possible backlash to the Callais decision will be, but Black turnout has surged during early voting in other Southern states that have recently redrawn their maps or threatened to do so.

The biggest increase has been in Louisiana, where the Callais case originated and where the Black share of the early vote jumped by nine points compared to 2024. Elsewhere in the South, Black turnout has increased by eight points in South Carolina, six points in Georgia, three points in North Carolina, and 2.5 points in Tennessee, according to data compiled by Tom Bonier, a senior adviser with the Democratic data firm TargetSmart. That continues a trend from the primaries, when turnout in majority-Black counties increased by nearly six points in Southern states that held primaries after the Callais decision, compared to a 1.1-point increase in states that held elections before, found VoteHub.

“Looking at the data in these Southern states, we are seeing huge increases in Black voter turnout,” says Bonier. Mr. Pate says Black turnout is up to 80 percent of the counties in the country compared to the last midterm election, with the biggest gains in the South, like in Louisiana and South Carolina, because of "very substantial increases among voters under the age of 30."

Under pressure from Trump, Republicans redrew 15 seats over the last two years in a shameless bid to retain the House. Only five of them, however, are rated solid or likely Republican by the Cook Political Report. Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a project of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, recently moved Figures’ race to a toss-up, while Cook shifted it from likely Republican to lean Republican, providing more evidence of its unexpected competitiveness. Trump’s signature plan to keep the House in GOP hands may ultimately end up helping Democrats more.