Who Will Represent Alabama’s New Democratic District?

After redistricting created another heavily Black congressional district, nearly a dozen candidates have put themselves forward.

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“I am here,” declared James Averhart, executive director of the Alabama NAACP and candidate for Alabama’s Second Congressional District, at a recent candidate forum in Mobile. “I live in this district. In March, I can vote for myself.”

Other candidates made similar appeals, such as state Rep. Napoleon Bracy, who evoked his record representing Mobile County since 2010, and former Biden administration official Shomari Figures, who boasted of being born and raised in Mobile and still calling it home. By contrast, high-profile candidates like state Rep. Juandalynn Givan and state Sen. Merika Coleman are from Birmingham, which is over 200 miles from Mobile. Alabama House minority leader Anthony Daniels is from even further away in northern Huntsville, and state Rep. Jeremy Gray is from northeast of the district in Opelika along the Georgia border.

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Opportunities like this don’t come along for Alabama Democrats every day, so political hopefuls are coming from all over the state to compete in the March 5 primary for a newly drawn seat that could help shift the balance of power in Congress. The Supreme Court, in Allen v. Milligan last June, ruled that the old Alabama redistricting map assembled by the legislature after the 2020 census violated the Voting Rights Act. Federal judges selected a new map that will give Black Alabamians, who represent over one-quarter of the population, a second plurality-Black district out of the seven in the state.

That will almost certainly flip one seat in Alabama to the Democrats in 2024. The only question is who will get it. In Alabama’s other heavily Black district, Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell caucuses with the centrist New Dems, has worked to split consensus party stances on the minimum wage by proposing regional variation, and co-founded a PAC to protect incumbents from progressive primary challenges. Where on the political spectrum will Alabama’s newest Democratic House member land?

THE NEW SECOND DISTRICT RUNS ACROSS THE ENTIRE WIDTH of the state, and includes Montgomery and Mobile, two of Alabama’s largest cities. The district overlaps with large swaths of the rural Alabama “Black Belt,” an area not often included in discourse about American blue-collar decay that tends to center whiteness. The region is considered to be amongst the poorest in America and suffers from many of the same problems experienced in white rural communities, as well as the institutional racial prejudice ubiquitous in Black communities. Most of the Democratic Party candidates are running on platforms that seek to address both racial injustices as well as rural poverty.

Of the 11-candidate field, which came together only in the past few months after the new maps were confirmed, Bracy, Figures, Gray, Daniels, Coleman, and Givan are considered to have the best chances of winning the primary by local media. One poll late last year showed Bracy and Figures in first and second place with 15 percent and 9 percent, respectively, but the sample was small and 47 percent of respondents declared themselves undecided. Some have said that Daniels, who came in at 8 percent in the poll, is in fact the front-runner because of union support and political connections.

Bracy’s campaign strategy seems to be almost entirely tied up with his familiarity with local communities in the district. His campaign website is full of references to the local community, and in a recent interview with the Alabama Reflector he said that jumping into the race “seemed like a natural fit because these are citizens that I had already been serving for the last two decades.” Bracy’s policy positions also skew local and sometimes have a tinge of 21st-century populism: He speaks of bringing manufacturing jobs to the district and expanding Medicaid to boost rural health care.

Figures, the son of two Alabama state legislators, is running on his Washington experience. He worked on the Biden-Harris transition team, served as deputy chief of staff to Attorney General Merrick Garland, and prior to that advised Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

“I’ve worked across all three branches of federal government,” he boasted in an early-January interview. “So I know how the government works, and I have networks, skills and experiences in Washington already that will be able to be deployed immediately for the benefit of the people of this district.”

Figures has reportedly already raised $250,000 in his first nine weeks as a candidate, and has declared that the money will enable him to “have the resources to reach every voter.” Interestingly, Figures has made providing “access to alternative capital” an important part of his platform. His website states that “Cryptocurrency is a catalyst for innovation and has revolutionized traditional financial systems …” Figures would like to see crypto leveraged for job creation in an “inclusive economy.” It’s the kind of thing one might have expected to see from candidates during the 2022 cycle, but less so in the post-SBF, GPT-crazed days of 2024.

Former NC State defensive back turned state representative Jeremy Gray expressed reluctance in a recent interview to detail specific legislation he’d be interested in pursuing as a member of Congress. Rather, he declared that he was “promising people things that just won’t happen on day one or year one.”

This is an odd statement, given that congressional terms last only two years. Gray’s campaign platform is hardly extravagant, though he did cite Amazon’s headquarters in Northern Virginia as the kind of thing he would like to see in the district. Gray has mainly spoken of securing federal funding for AL-02 for education, health care, and infrastructure through “wheeling and dealing” in Washington.

Alabama House minority leader Anthony Daniels has attracted union support, such as an endorsement from the Professional Fire Fighters Association (the Alabama chapter of the national union) on January 22nd. That kind of support can go a long way in crowded primaries and is one reason some have considered Daniels “the favorite” in the race despite hailing from far outside the district boundaries.

Daniels’s campaign strategy seems predicated on general-election electability, which is interesting given that the new district is expected to be safely Democratic in November.

Daniels’s campaign website, which is fairly bare and free of policy specifics, states that “His ability to build consensus—on both sides of the political divide—has resulted in public policy that strengthens Alabama’s economy, creates good-paying jobs, and opportunity for all Alabamians.”

Elsewhere, Daniels has talked about laws he helped pass in the Alabama state House, such as the elimination of a statewide tax on overtime pay. “The first priority for me going into Congress is to eliminate the income tax on overtime pay at the federal level,” he said at the Mobile candidate forum earlier in January.

State Rep. Givan is running the most outwardly populist campaign of the candidates considered viable by local media, often mentioning her coal miner father who passed away in 2015 and positioning herself as the voice of the Alabama Black Belt. Those living in the Black Belt are “simple” people, she has declared, who “don’t want all the glitz and glam of big city living.” She has advocated for a $15 minimum wage, restorative justice for incarcerated people, and federal protections for reproductive rights.

“I still have not seen a day with regards to health issues that America or my colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle dare to pass legislation to tell a man what he can and cannot do with his penis,” said Givan in a recent interview. “Every year there are laws as to what a woman can do or should do or mandate what she must do with her vagina.” Reproductive rights is an especially urgent topic in Alabama given the state’s repressive post-Roe abortion ban.

Merika Coleman is the one state senator running in the AL-02 primary, having been elected in 2022. Her Twitter avatar features a selfie with President Biden, though her campaign website makes no mention of him. Like other candidates, she has said she will advocate in Congress for federal funds to be sent to the Second District and would like to see incentives for businesses to keep jobs in the region.

Coleman has used her position as state senator to propose legislation that some of her primary opponents, such as Givan, have said was politically motivated and of little use. One such bill, a proposal that would apparently create mechanisms for the public disclosure of body cam footage, was unveiled by Coleman at a press conference in late December, where she was flanked by the surviving family of Jawan Dallas, a 36-year-old killed by police last summer. Givan declared that the bill was giving “false hope” to the Dallas family and was functionally a political prop.

“Definitely a campaign move on her part,” added Givan, who herself sponsored a body cam bill that was signed into law in September 2023. In this example and others, Givan has demonstrated a certain brazenness that would likely make her a lightning rod in Washington should she win the primary and general election.

Things are fluid in the primary, though it does seem at this stage that Daniels, Bracy, and Figures have the best chances of winning given their organizational capabilities. Whether they are the best policy options remains to be seen.

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