Marilyn Lands, a Democrat who ran a campaign focused on abortion, won by double-digits – 62% to 37%.
By Grace Panetta
Senior Politics Reporter
Business Insider
Democrat Marilyn Lands gained national attention in March when she flipped an Alabama state House seat with a campaign focused on abortion and reproductive rights. And she doesn’t want to be the last.
Lands’ supporters are launching a new PAC, Respect Alabama, to recruit, train and elect more women to run for office in Alabama, where women, especially Black women, are underrepresented in government. The PAC plans to support Democrats but is open to backing candidates running for local races, like school board, that are nonpartisan in Alabama. Democrats in the state have been chronically under-resourced, and Democratic women face an especially difficult path to running for office.
In her campaign, Lands ran explicitly on overturning the state’s near-total abortion ban, including telling her own story. Weeks before the election, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children, halting fertility treatment for many in the state. Lands said her win sent a “clear message” that voters want to shift the state’s current direction.
“People want change, and they particularly want change around this issue,” she said. “And this was a way they saw they could make that happen.”
Respect Alabama will recruit and support women candidates starting in the 2026 election cycle, said Jordan Cozby, Lands’ son and a Yale Law School student who worked on Lands’ campaign and is helping launch the PAC.
Among the PAC’s goals are to elect enough Democrats to crack Republicans two-thirds supermajority of six-seats in Alabama’s state House. The threshold for advancing legislation in the state House is 60 percent, meaning that Democrats would have to flip over a dozen seats in the lower chamber to gain enough power to thwart or block Republican bills. The PAC also wants to bring more national Democratic investment to the state, which Lands has described as “ground zero” for reproductive rights.”
“I think what we have realized by just being Democrats in Alabama is, what starts here often spreads to other states,” Cozby said. “Some of these deep red Southern states are the testing ground or the laboratory for the conservative movements and new, bold ideas restricting people’s freedoms. And we can’t concede these things even when they’re tough.”
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, originated from an abortion ban passed by Republican lawmakers in Mississippi. The high court’s decision sent abortion policy back to the states — and further highlighted the importance of state legislatures.
In red and purple states especially, women lawmakers have led fights to add exceptions or overturn abortion bans. Lands said that even before she ran first for office in the battleground Huntsville-area House District 10 in 2022, she saw a glaring need for more balance and greater representation of women in office.
Women make up over half of Alabama’s population but less than one-fifth of its state legislature, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. Alabama ranks 46th in the country for representation of women.
“When you look at the Alabama legislature, it doesn’t look like the state of Alabama,” Lands said.
Cozby said building diverse leadership for Respect Alabama will be central to the organization’s mission. Black women make up the core of the Democratic Party’s base in Alabama and the Deep South but are less than 10 percent of the Alabama legislature. Recruiting Black women candidates to run for office, especially in diverse, fast-growing communities like Lands’, will be a “huge priority,” Cozby said.
“I think we have a really rich base of potential candidates who can run in those districts and can be successful,” he said.
Respect Alabama aims to serve as a hub of dedicated training and mentorship resources, filling a void for women candidates in the state.
Eight of the bottom 10 states for women’s representation in CAWP’s rankings are in the South. Kelly Dittmar, CAWP’s director of research, said both partisanship and access to resources can explain that dynamic. Democrats have traditionally emphasized diversity and representation among their candidates, meaning that heavily Republican states often have fewer women in state legislatures and in leadership positions.
Research has shown that women candidates, especially women of color, are at a disadvantage when it comes to fundraising and building a donor network. Running in a state where Democratic Party organizations have far fewer resources than their Republican counterparts, Lands relied on her deep ties to the community to build out a grassroots donor network.
“It’s so hard to fight for money,” Lands said. “In the South in general, we just don’t have as many places to go to to try to raise funds and build support. We got about 1,250 small donors, and that can be done, and we fought back pretty good. So I think I have a story to share with other women.”
In Southern and Republican-dominated states especially, “good old boy” networks concentrate wealth and power, heavily shaping who gets elected to political offices. Such networks pave a far easier path for Republican candidates, especially men, to run and gain support.
“Historically, we see men have on the whole greater access to them, because men are often a greater proportion of the actors or leaders in those networks,” Dittmar said. “They tend to have control over those financial resources, or things like endorsements and strategic resources that they can allocate…we do have to also recognize that national Democratic resources are limited to the degree that they come into Alabama at all.”
While races like Lands’ and the 2017 U.S. Senate special election in Alabama attracted national attention, Democratic candidates running in overwhelmingly red Southern states have long struggled to secure consistent investment from national groups.
A review of campaign finance filings from the District 10 special election shows Lands’ Republican opponent Teddy Powell received a $10,000 contribution from the Republican State Leadership Committee, a national Republican group, and donations from well-funded PACs and business interests in the state. Lands’ campaign, meanwhile, got funding from some local organizations and labor unions but appears to have received no contributions from national groups or PACs. The only contribution from a national PAC listed in Lands’ disclosures, $500 from the Communications Workers of America’s PAC, came from the organization’s local affiliate, Cozby said.
Cozby anticipates that Respect Alabama will make “a substantial financial investment” to supplement the training and mentorship it will provide women candidates. He hopes Respect Alabama’s contributions will create a “snowball effect” that encourages other donors in the state and nationally to give to women candidates.
“We’re going to target some of those races and bring in money that might not otherwise come to Alabama to make change,” he said.
While the PAC aims to elect more Democrats to the state legislature, Cozby said Respect Alabama will support a variety of candidates, potentially including women runnning for nonpartisan state and local races, who they believe can make “a positive impact” on the state’s trajectory.
Lands is eyeing districts around Madison County, which she represents, as well as Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, as places that could flip blue in 2026.
“I think we’re going to pick up a few seats and begin to get towards something that approaches balance,” Lands said.
As a party that cares about marginalized communities, Cozby said, Democrats “can’t concede” Southern states that are home to significant populations of women, people of color and LGBTQ+ Americans. And if successful, Respect Alabama plans to expand its efforts to help boost Democratic women running in other Deep South states like Tennessee and Mississippi.
“There’s a real success story here, and there’s a lot of momentum here that we want to capitalize on,” Cozby said. “My hope would be that after 2026, the Marilyn Lands story is a small part of a much bigger story going on in Alabama.”
Originally published by The 19th, 04.16.2024, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International license.
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