One met his wife in Tuscaloosa. The other met his at the Obama White House.

Two men from the Mobile area went to the University of Alabama. One came home. That is the whole election, and it took us until now to be able to write it, because until last Tuesday there was no second man to name.

Wall of Shame — Today: Vulcan Materials

Today on the Wall of Shame: the Vulcan Materials PAC (Vestavia) has put $10,000 into Rep. Shomari Figures' campaign account. Figures then voted no on cross-border energy infrastructure — the pipeline permitting and construction that drives demand for aggregates. The Wall of Shame exists for one reason — so that total stops growing. https://take2back.com/wall-of-shame.html

TWO MEN, ONE UNIVERSITY

Rhett Marques was born in Spanish Fort. Fairhope High School, then the University of Alabama, class of 1994. He met his wife Christina there. They have been married thirty-one years. They built their life in Enterprise, raised two daughters, and he has owned and run a tire and automotive shop in that town for more than twenty-six years. He has served in the Alabama House since 2018.

Shomari Figures was born in Mobile. LeFlore Magnet, then the University of Alabama, class of 2006, then Alabama Law in 2010. Then Washington — a federal clerkship, the Obama re-election campaign, the Obama White House, the Justice Department, a United States Senate office, and back to Justice as deputy chief of staff to the Attorney General. Fourteen years.

Marques met his wife at the University of Alabama. Figures met his at the Obama White House.

One of them built a tire shop in Enterprise and ran it for twenty-six years. The other built a career in Washington and ran it for fourteen.

Nobody has to characterize that. You put the two sentences beside each other and the reader does the rest.

HE HAS NEVER DENIED THE WASHINGTON PART

He deserves his due here. Asked about it during the 2024 Democratic primary, Figures said plainly that it was no secret he had lived in the D.C. area while working at the highest levels of the federal government.

He is entitled to be proud of it. It is a serious resume for a Washington insider and a proud Democrat.

The question was never whether the work mattered. It is whose district this is, and who has spent the last quarter century inside it.

THE SHARPEST VERSION CAME FROM A DEMOCRAT

We did not make this case first. Anthony Daniels did — the Democratic Leader of the Alabama House — when he ran against Figures for this same seat.

In the closing weeks of the 2024 Democratic primary, as reported by the Alabama Political Reporter, the Daniels campaign put it in mailers and in its own polling: that Figures and his family had moved into a $1.2 million home in the Bethesda, Maryland area in 2022; that Figures claimed Alabama residency only a few weeks before the November 2023 filing deadline; and that his family remained in Bethesda.

Daniels said it himself, defending his own Huntsville address: he does not have to get on a plane to get to the district like his opponent does.

Yes, Daniels endorsed him that September, once the alternative was a Republican. That is what partisans do in a general election. It is not a retraction, the mailers were never withdrawn, and he said it when he was running against Figures and being wrong would have cost him.

HE CAME HOME FOR A DISTRICT THAT NO LONGER EXISTS

Figures declared in November 2023, weeks after a federal court handed down a map drawn to create a second majority-Black district in Alabama. That was the seat he came home to run for.

On June 2 of this year the Supreme Court cleared Alabama to use its 2023 congressional map. District 2 no longer includes Mobile. Its Black voting-age population falls from roughly forty-nine percent to under forty.

He is running in a district he did not move home for.

THE POLL THEY PUT OUT THIS MORNING

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released an internal poll today showing the race tied at forty-six, with eight percent undecided.

Read the date before you read the number. It was in the field on July 29 and 30. Marques did not become the nominee until August 11.

Voters were asked to choose between the incumbent and a Republican who was still one of six men competing, and the least known of them. The poll does not describe this race. It describes a race that had not happened yet.

The poll is owed this much: the sample is one the committee itself calls R+9, in a district the President carried by fourteen, and it still came back even. If those toplines are honest, the incumbent is running ahead of his district's lean — which is what a well-funded incumbent with universal name recognition ought to do against a man most voters could not pick out three weeks ago.

The more useful signal is that they published it at all. A party committee that believed it was comfortably ahead does not put out internal numbers to say the race is a toss-up. It does that when it needs money and needs Washington to believe the seat is live.

TOMORROW AT TROY

Doug Jones joins Figures tomorrow evening at Troy University for a student-focused town hall at the Trojan Center Ballroom. It is their third joint appearance in seven days.

The start time still has not been published by either campaign. The promotion has come from a campus club and the county party.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The map is settled. The nominee is set. There are seventy-eight days.

One of these men has spent twenty-six years signing the front of paychecks in Enterprise and eight years voting on Alabama bills in Montgomery. The other spent fourteen years in Washington and the last twenty months as this district's congressman.

On November 3, District 2 decides which of those it wants representing it.

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