Who’s really paying for Shomari Figures?

Wall of Shame — Today: Maynard Nexsen

Today on the Wall of Shame: the Maynard Nexsen PAC (Birmingham) has put $5,000 into Rep. Shomari Figures' campaign account. The same firm was also writing checks to the Republican primary opponent — bipartisan hedging from the firm representing Regions Bank in the Mabel Amos case. The Wall of Shame exists for one reason — so that total stops growing. https://take2back.com/wall-of-shame.html

TWENTY-TWO POINTS

Here is the figure behind the rating. On June 2 the Supreme Court cleared Alabama to use its 2023 congressional map, and that redraw moved this district roughly twenty-two points to the right.

Donald Trump carried the new District 2 by 14.3 points in 2024.

Those two numbers sit beside the poll the DCCC released Monday. A committee-funded survey, taken before there was a Republican nominee, in a sample the committee itself calls R+9, came back tied — in a district that voted for Trump by fourteen.

An incumbent congressman with universal name recognition, running even in a district that leans fourteen points against his party, is not a candidate who has solved his problem. He is a candidate whose own committee needed to publish a number.

WHAT WASHINGTON IS ACTUALLY DOING ABOUT IT

Both national committees have now moved on this seat, and their behavior is more informative than their statements.

The DCCC has placed Figures in its Frontline program — the list it maintains for the incumbents it believes are most likely to lose. Its chair says the path back to a Democratic majority runs through seats like his.

The NRCC has launched its campaign to take the seat, on the record, with a Trump-endorsed nominee already in place.

Frontline is not a compliment. It is triage. A national party does not put a first-term congressman on its endangered list, or send its chair out to say the majority depends on him, unless its own people think he is in trouble.

They are telling us he can be beaten. We should believe them.

THE MONEY IS EVEN. THAT IS THE NEWS.

Through the first six months of this year, FEC records show Marques raised $1,300,076.32 and Figures raised $1,295,921.07.

Four thousand dollars apart.

For most of two years the argument on this page has been that Figures out-raises everyone with money that is not from here — 89.4 percent of it from outside Alabama, $2.7 million from Silicon Valley crypto donors, $40,145 from people who actually live in District 2.

That advantage is gone. A state representative who owns a tire shop in Enterprise has matched a sitting congressman backed by a national party dollar for dollar. Whatever else the out-of-state machine buys between now and November, it is no longer buying a fundraising gap.

TONIGHT AT TROY

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

Neither campaign published a start time. The promotion came from a campus club and the county party.

A congressman defending a district that leans fourteen points against him is spending an August evening in front of a student audience with a former senator who lost this state in 2020 by twenty.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Seventy-seven days.

The map is settled. The nominee is set. The money is level. The nonpartisan raters say likely Republican, and the Democratic committee agrees enough to put its incumbent on the endangered list and publish a poll asking Washington for help.

None of that wins anything. Ratings do not vote and neither does money.

On November 3, District 2 decides.