A Blowout in Ala-frikkin-bama

A huge Democratic win in a GOP-leaning district in deeply red Alabama shines a spotlight on reproductive rights and provides a national roadmap for victory.

Marilyn Lands wins big in Alabama’s District 10. Image courtesy of Newsweek

The biggest surprises in recent elections have taken place not in blue enclaves but rather in the deep red states, places like Kansas, Ohio, Kentucky and now…Alabama.

Yes, Alabama.

Marilyn Lands is a mental health professional from the northern part of Alabama who decided enough was enough. She was tired of seeing reproductive rights stripped away from women in her home state.

Her special election campaign for a state house seat in District 10 drew national attention. It was the first election in the country since the Alabama Supreme Court decided that embryos were “persons” under the state’s constitution, causing a national political maelstrom.

Internal polls from the two candidates’ campaigns showed Lands and her opponent, Madison City Council member Teddy Powell, in more or less a dead heat, with conflicting results. But polls aren’t votes. And when it came to those votes, Lands romped. 

With all votes in, Lands won by a whopping 25 points—in a district that voted narrowly for Trump in 2020 and for the GOP candidate by 7 points just two years ago.

This result is a political thunderbolt for the parties’ strategists and chief messengers. Democrats see it as a blueprint for victory, even in very tough to win areas, including legislative races in Republican-held, gerrymandered states. Meanwhile, Republicans are likely panicking, or at least they should be, about what it could portend for their own races and national fortunes.

Let’s take a closer look at Lands’s campaign and these supercharged results and place them in the larger context of voter messaging and enthusiasm.

Reproductive rights, front and center

Alabama already has one of the strictest anti-abortion laws in the country. Like Gov. Andy Beshear in Kentucky, Lands decided to put abortion rights front and center in her campaign. “We’ve seen so much progress in women’s rights and to see us go backward 20 years just takes my breath away,” Lands said in an interview. “That’s not the way progress is supposed to work.”

Her campaign centered an ad that featured gripping personal stories of women in need of abortion care—including herself. It first features Alyssa Gonzales and her husband, who learned in 2022 that her second pregnancy suffered from a rare genetic disorder, which is nearly always fatal to the fetus and could pose serious risks to Gonzales’s health. Despite a supposed legal exception for fatal fetal diagnosis, Gonzales couldn’t obtain an abortion in-state and had to travel 10 hours by car to Washington D.C. Gonzales had rely upon an abortion fund to receive the care she needed.

In the ad, Lands also bravely told her own story, including her devastating decision to obtain an abortion when her fetus developed a fatal disorder. 

“I’m sharing my abortion story because Alabama’s no exceptions abortion ban is putting lives at risk,” Lands posted on social media. “We must repeal this legislation, and if I’m elected on March 26th, I’ll work tirelessly to do just that.”

You can watch the whole ad here:

IVF as a new front in the election

Lands’s message of protecting reproductive rights received an unexpected jolt when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last month that embryos are children under the state constitution. Several prominent IVF clinics paused their services in-state, and Alabama legislators, fearing the political storm that the decision would ignite, scrambled to pass a law to grant immunity to IVF providers and patients. 

But women and families hoping for children through IVF still heard the stark and invasive message: IVF is on the chopping block. As if to underscore the risk, Republicans in Congress blocked Sen. Tammy Duckworth’s IVF bill, demonstrating that Republicans may say all the right things but still won’t act accordingly.

Lands leaned into the IVF debate, tying it to what is happening to reproductive rights generally. “The stakes are just so much higher with the IVF ruling and risk to contraception at this point,” she said last Friday. “So I see Alabama right now as kind of ground zero for attacks on women’s freedoms and reproductive health care.”

She also underscored how extreme things have gotten and made her campaign about reversing that. “I didn’t know that we could go any lower. And yet, we proved we’re capable of that,” Lands said. “And there’s a real sense from the people I’ve been talking with that we have just gone too far.”

Lands’s GOP opponent, Teddy Powell, a Madison City Council member, ran a traditional campaign focusing on economic development and infrastructure. But he couldn’t escape the larger question of reproductive rights. After the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF decision came out, Powell posted on social media in support of access to IVF treatments, even while hedging that statement with a nod toward the “sanctity of life”—creating an inherent contradiction for anyone actually familiar with how IVF operates in the real world.

Every family in Alabama should have access to IVF treatments. Supporting families and making Madison County the best place to live is and has been my message from the start and that will never change. I hope the legislature acts quickly to correct this issue in the law. IVF allows women to become mothers and couples to become families. Protecting the sanctity of life while supporting women’s access to IVF treatments go hand in hand.

In a Washington Post interview, Powell referred to the IVF ruling and ensuing outrage as an issue that’s already been “fixed.”

“It’s certainly an issue that needs to be dealt with,” Powell told Politico, “but not our top issue. I don’t think that this is the issue that wins or loses the race.”

By contrast, Lands amplified the IVF question and took strong issue with the limitations of the new legislation. In a Friday news conference with the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which is organizing for state legislative victories across the country over the question of reproductive rights, Lands criticized the legislation as not going far enough.

“I want to make it very clear that IVF access does remain restricted in Alabama. In Gov. Ivey’s own words, the recent legislative fix is only a short-term measure. The law does not undo the far-reaching implications of the ruling,” Lands warned. 

Echoing Lands’s words, DLCC Communications Director Abhi Rahman observed that “all eyes should be on Alabama right now.” Rahman added, “Last month’s IVF ruling in Alabama was a political earthquake that reverberated across the country, but the political consequences of that decision have yet to be tested. That’s where today’s election comes in.”

A Lands-lide victory

AL-10 has gone for the Republican candidate in most elections, and when a Democrat has managed to win it, it hasn’t been by much. The only big exception was when Doug Jones was running for Senate in 2017 against a known child molester, Roy Moore. Here’s the history of how elections have gone in that district, and you’ll see it’s pretty strongly red.

For Lands to pull off a 25 point win is indeed a seismic shift—a move of 32 points since 2022. You can see how striking the shift and the victory was by looking at the district map, provided by the Center for Politics. Since the last time she ran two years ago, Lands has picked up 16 points and the Republican fell by the same amount. Even most of the gerrymandered sliver in the northwest went blue.

“Today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation,” Lands said in a statement, calling for protection of reproductive rights.

Analysts will be poring over the turnout data for days to come, but it’s safe to say that a strong turnout among women in this special election propelled Lands to victory.

National implications

There are a few key takeaways here. 

In a broad sense, the IVF question, on top of abortion, is a political loser for Republicans, and they know it. Their answer is quick legislative fixes and messages of reassurance, but these aren’t likely to mollify the voters, especially women and families who are looking deeply into the implications of things like “personhood” status for embryos. Republicans remain highly vulnerable on this, and it is a strong wedge that Democrats can and should use, especially given how many national Republican leaders have signed on to “life begins at conception” legislation.

The election also shows that Democrats can win in deeply red states and within traditional Republican districts by leveraging the anger of women voters—the very ones who, as Justice Alito snidely remarked in Dobbs, are “not without political power.” While special elections are their own breed and can’t be extrapolated from too far, largely because of low but sometimes highly motivated turnout, a small but dedicated bloc of voters is often enough to tip close races, even in a general election. If Republicans are counting on women losing interest in reproductive rights by November, they are likely in for a nasty surprise, based on the unbroken string of reproductive rights victories across even deeply red states.

Reproductive rights amendments proposed for state constitutions may also play an outsized role in generating turnout in hotly contested elections, particularly in Montana, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, should those amendments qualify for the ballot. Control of the Senate, and indeed the White House in the case of the latter three, may depend on who wins statewide in these races.

Finally, and as part of my continuing crusade on this, I have to emphasize that polling continues to produce big misses. The two campaigns’ internal polls produced more or less a dead heat race, with each claiming to be up by single digits. They were both wrong, in Powell’s case by more than 30 points. The polling methodologies may be ignoring key demographics or overlooking voters who are specifically motivated over abortion and reproductive rights. Or perhaps the polls may be overweighting and oversampling MAGA and conservative voters by relying too heavily on the kind of political extremists weird enough to respond to and complete a political poll. Whatever the reason, Alabama District 10 is another example of the polls saying one thing and the actual voters telling us another. And I prefer to go with the latter.

Democrats have strong reason to cheer this rather amazing election result, particularly because it confirms, once again, that the Dobbs decision is politically radioactive for the GOP. The IVF case out of Alabama further proved that social and religious extremists are still far from done, and that their weak compatriots in Washington will readily enable them. 

Out of this, Democrats now have a valuable blueprint and potent message for November: Unless these radicals are voted out of office and kept from power at all levels, from the statehouses to Congress, they will continue to infringe upon and corrode our most cherished personal liberties and freedoms, including even the most intimate questions of family planning.