The Alabama Democrat who flipped a seat in Trump country

Democrats triumphed in yet another special election focused on abortion rights Tuesday night, when Alabama’s Marilyn Lands flipped a Republican state House seat in an unexpectedly lopsided vote.

“We’ve sent a clear message to Alabama that the people want something different, and a message to the rest of the country that Alabama wants to move in a different direction,” Lands said in a Wednesday morning interview with Semafor. After being sworn in next week, she planned to find “common ground” with Republicans, who hold a supermajority in Montgomery, to relax the state’s total abortion ban.

Lands, who’d narrowly lost a 2022 race for Alabama’s 10th House district, won the special election by 25 points. That was a 26-point swing from 2020, when President Joe Biden lost a seat that encompasses parts of Huntsville and Madison, the fastest-growing part of the state.

The climate changed, said Lands, after the Dobbs decision — and after the state Supreme Court ruled that embryos frozen as part of IVF had the legal rights of children. Republicans in Montgomery tried to react, quickly passing legislation that granted legal immunity to fertility clinics. Lands’ opponent, Republican Teddy Powell, endorsed the change.

“Protecting the sanctity of life while supporting women’s access to IVF treatments go hand in hand,” Powell wrote on Facebook.”

But that didn’t alter the dynamics of the race, as Lands campaigned against the state’s total abortion ban, favoring a return to the status quo under Roe v. Wade. She was endorsed by Mike Ball, a Republican who used to represent the seat, but said that “the party of Trump” had left him.

In a widely-shared campaign video, Lands shared her personal experience getting a legal abortion after learning that a baby she was carrying “would not survive” and told the story of Alyssa Gonzales, a fellow Alabamian who learned in 2022 that her pregnancy was non-viable, but needed to travel outside the state for an abortion.

“Both of us were told that our lives were at risk,” Lands told Semafor. “I don’t believe that she had ever been out of the state before they made that trip. So she has to go to a strange place with a doctor she’s never met. It seemed to me that the story of how we went so far backwards in two decades was compelling, and I needed to share it.”

Democrats keep over-performing in post-Dobbs special elections, especially when they’re held in suburbs — any suburbs.

Last month, Rep. Tom Suozzi won back his old House seat on Long Island, a race that Republicans tried to turn into a referendum on crime and illegal immigration, partly by attacking his opponent’s anti-abortion views. (Republican Mazi Pilip gave inconsistent answers on abortion after calling herself “pro-life,” and won’t seek the seat again in November.) House Republicans workshopped new abortion messaging at their retreat this month, but didn’t come up with more than a promise to talk about the topic before Democrats could define it, and to support IVF.

They did both in Alabama, but the current Democratic coalition — more highly-educated, more likely to vote in every race — was energized by the IVF ruling. Lands attracted more than 1100 donors, for an election with fewer than 6000 voters. At high-profile moments for Alabama Republicans, including the poorly-received, immigration-focused State of the Union response from Sen. Katie Britt, they got outplayed.

In a Wednesday night statement, Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez called Lands a “pro-choice champion,” and said that the same issues would help the president get re-elected.

“Trump overturned Roe v. Wade, paving the way for attacks on women’s freedoms like we saw in Alabama – now he’s running to ban abortion and gut access to IVF nationwide,” she said. “Tonight’s results should serve as a major warning sign for Trump: voters will not stand for his attacks on reproductive health care. This November will be no different.”

• In the 19th, Grace Panetta profiles Lands and the race she’d run, asking whether it might be “a barometer of how much strict abortion bans — and recent attacks on [IVF] — have impacted politics, even in a deep red state.”
• In the Alabama Reflector, Bryan Lyman analyzes what the result means for the state’s outnumbered Democrats: “The real test will come when a Democratic candidate takes Lands’ approach to Lee or Tuscaloosa counties. Or when a Democrat tries to run on abortion in a deep red suburban county like Shelby or Baldwin.”