VICTORY! Alabama Dem wins deep red district with reproductive rights agenda
A deep red state legislature seat in Alabama just flipped to a Democrat — and women are seeing it as a harbinger.
Democrat Marylin Lands just earned a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives in a race that could be seen as a referendum on both reproductive health protections and Republican criminality.
It’s also a warning about the accuracy of polls, as what appeared to be a close race turned out to be a 63-37 rout.
Lands ran a campaign focused on fighting for reproductive rights, sharing her own abortion story, and promising to work to prevent the far-right’s anti-choice agenda from ripping away options including abortion and IVF.
Her opponent, Teddy Powell, ran on getting the government out of healthcare, securing the border, and reducing taxes.
She’s run in this district before, against her predecessor, David Cole, in 2022, and lost by 7 points. That was before Cole was forced to resign and agreed to enter a guilty plea for voter fraud. The Alabama Reflector reports:
“Lands said reproductive rights became a priority in her campaign after the Alabama Supreme Court’s Feb. 16 ruling on in vitro fertilization, which declared frozen embryos are children and led to at least three clinics halting IVF treatment…Powell conceded to Lands shortly after the polls closed at 7 p.m.”
The seat has been vacant since fall, when then-Representative Cole resigned it and agreed to plead guilty to voter fraud, after lying about his home address to qualify to run in a District where he did not live and entering a plea deal in which he’d admit to casting a ballot in a polling place where he was not eligible to do so.
That plea deal involved a sentence of three years, 60 days of which would be served in prison and the rest on probation, according to WHNT.
This win is not turning Alabama’s legislature blue, by any means. The state’s House of Representatives is held by a supermajority of Republicans, 75 to 27, according to 270ToWin, and of the two seats still vacant, one was held by a Republican who moved to the Senate, and the other by a Democrat who resigned after being indicted on Federal charges.
This election does, however, suggest a slight turn of the tide in an election year where abortion rights are expected to be one of the biggest issues, and hints that polling is not currently effectively returning representative samples.
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