Alabama Republicans redrew Rep. Shomari Figures’s district to take him out of Congress. He won it anyway, with 53.8% of the vote to state Rep. Rhett Marques’s 46.2%.
The new lines cut the Black voting-age population of the 2nd District from roughly 48% to about 40%. The Supreme Court let the Republican-drawn map stand in June, after its Callais decision weakened the Voting Rights Act, halting a lower-court injunction. That lower court had found the earlier map deliberately suppressed Black voters’ power. In a state where Black residents are about 27% of the voting-age population, the map was built to shrink what that share could win.
Black voters and the organizers around them answered at the ballot box. Figures, first elected in 2024, said the campaign did not change its message when the map changed. “The message we were getting to people and how we were getting the message to people, none of that changed,” he said, as Capital B reported. “The only thing that changed is where we were getting that message to.” About 40% of the district’s voters were new to him. “We had a job to do, and so we put our hands to the plow, and we did not look backwards,” he said, according to the Alabama Reporter.
The win rests on work that began years before this map. Alabama voting-rights groups have held regular video calls since 2021, even when they disagreed over legal strategy, Capital B reported. After the June ruling they identified which communities needed outreach, set up local hubs and talked to voters about health care, the cost of living and infrastructure, not only district lines. Evan Milligan, the named plaintiff in the Alabama voting case, and Anneshia Hardy, executive director of Alabama Values, were among them.
Hardy was careful about what the result proves. “The community’s ability to overcome a barrier doesn’t mean that the barrier was justified in the first place,” she said. Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said Black voters “sent a resounding message that we cannot be silenced or counted out.”
Alabama’s House delegation is still 5-2 Republican. A map drawn to flip a seat, and beaten because Black organizers worked harder than the lines assumed, is not proof the lines were fair. It is a measure of what they cost. Black voters should not have to beat the map every two years, and restoring the protections the court removed, as advocates urge through the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, is how that stops.
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