Alabama Democrats Look for a Black Backlash Over Voting Rights

Doug Jones, a former senator, and Shomari Figures, a current but endangered representative, have been here before in Alabama.

Mr. Jones lost his Senate seat in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, a former college football coach, and now hopes to beat him in November in a contest for governor. Mr. Figures won a House district in 2024 that was redrawn to give Black voters more representation. Now he is confronting new district lines drawn ***ly to give his seat to a Republican.

Besides being Democrats, what both men have in common is a need for Alabama’s Black voters to come out in November in overwhelming numbers, energized and angered in part by the Supreme Court’s decision in April that weakened the Voting Rights Act and set off a new wave of redistricting in the South.

“They know that their vote is not counting the same way,” Mr. Jones said of Black voters in an interview before a town hall in Troy, Ala., on Tuesday. He added, “People are paying attention to that, and they’re not happy about it.”

Voting rights are deeply personal in Alabama, where the state’s white leaders spent the civil rights movement strenuously resisting their Black citizens’ demands for a fair shake at the ballot box. The blood of those citizens helped galvanize Washington to enact the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Then this spring, acting on a lawsuit in Louisiana, the Supreme Court freed Southern leaders from the act’s strictures encouraging minority representation. Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama all moved quickly to dilute districts with strong blocs of Black voters and tilt them toward the G.O.P.

Alabama’s Legislature redrew the Second Congressional District where Mr. Figures’s victory in 2024 gave the state two Black House members — Mr. Figures and Representative Terri Sewell — for the first time.

“Two was like giving candy to a baby — we were so happy, so excited,” said Gwendolyn Davis, 67, as she prepared to leave the Troy town hall with a stack of yard signs. “And with one stroke of a pen from another state, the Supreme Court has reversed” that.

She added, “I will do whatever I can to make sure that people realize how important it is.”

The new Second District was drawn to favor Republicans by pairing the majority-Black city of Montgomery with part of the southeastern Wiregrblock region, making the new district whiter and more conservative. The old lines had stretched farther across the state, linking voters in Montgomery and part of Mobile to voters in the rural counties once farmed by slaves.

Both Mr. Tuberville and Rhett Marques, a Republican state representative running against Mr. Figures, supported the new congressional map and are favored to win their races. Even in a year without Mr. Trump on the ballot, Alabama remains deeply red.

Their campaigns, both backed by Mr. Trump, have worked to frame their Democratic opponents as extreme and out of touch. In a primary election night speech this month, Mr. Marques described the election as a choice between “craziness and common sense.”

But Democrats say they have a chance, predicting that a backlash over the new congressional maps will energize Black voters as President Trump’s sagging approval ratings demoralize white conservatives, many of who might sit the election out.

That Democratic hope goes beyond Alabama and other Southern states directly affected by the voting rights decision. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Wednesday launched digital advertisements in New York, Nebraska and Ohio House districts aimed at mobilizing Black voters, some of them ***ly invoking voting rights and the need for representation. Those ads followed a civil-rights-themed blitz last May in 21 House districts.

There is evidence that Black voters are indeed energized, though not necessarily over voting rights. In Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor last week, David Crowley, Milwaukee County’s Black executive, scored an astounding upset over a democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, who had been leading comfortably in the polls but struggling with Black voters. Black Milwaukee may well have made the difference.

A similar story played out in Michigan earlier this month, where Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive physician running for Senate, seemed to be cruising to a Democratic primary victory, despite troubles with Black voter support. In the end, he barely squeaked out a win over Representative Haley Stevens, who defied the polls and nearly scored an upset with Black support in Detroit and Flint.

For Mr. Jones and Mr. Figures, the civil rights theme is not a stretch. As a U.S. attorney in Birmingham, Mr. Jones helped prosecute two members of the Ku Klux Klan who bombed a church there in 1963 and killed four young Black girls.

Mr. Figures’s father, Michael Figures, a state senator and civil rights lawyer, helped bring the lawsuit that bankrupted the Klan. Michael Figures also helped sue the state of Alabama over its congressional map in the 1990s, leading to the creation of the first majority-Black district in the state.

This campaign season, Mr. Figures and Mr. Jones have linked arms, joining each other in Troy and Montgomery for town halls this month where they challenged their state leaders.

“They have to do everything they can to reduce representation,” Mr. Figures told the crowd in a ballroom at Troy University.

“They redrew my district in furtherance of that effort,” he said. “But we’re going to win it in November.”

Mr. Jones has campaigned in several majority-Black counties, including rural Greene County, which has already shown signs of the energy that he will need. About 79 percent of Greene County is Black, and in the May primary, turnout was strikingly high.

Last month, Mr. Jones told a cluster of residents gathered at the Greene County courthouse that Alabama leaders were “going to draw district lines to make sure” that “your voice is not represented in the Congress of the United States.”

“I think the Voting Rights Act is going to be an issue in this fall campaign,” Mr. Jones added. “And I think people are energized.”

Such sentiments carry risk. Some organizers cautioned that the new maps could also demoralize Black Alabamians already disconnected from political leaders. Energizing such voters will not happen automatically.

“Each time that you take people’s rights away like that, they’re going to be discouraged and they’re not going to want to go vote,” said Marilyn Hobbs, who volunteers with a voter education organization in Montgomery. “We’ve got to knock on the doors.”