Alabama Holds Special U.S. House Primaries in Four Redrawn Districts; Marques Wins 2nd District GOP Race With 50%

A Second Vote in Three Months, and a Map That Didn't Exist in 2024

Alabama voters in four congressional districts went back to the polls on Tuesday, August 11, 2026, to pick party nominees for the U.S. House^[1][2]. It was the second time this year they'd been asked to vote in these races. The first primary, for all seven of the state's districts, had been set for May 19. Republican Gov. Kay Ivey postponed the four affected races while the state's congressional map was still tied up in court^[3].

The map on the ballot Tuesday was drawn by Alabama's Republican-controlled legislature back in 2023. A three-judge federal panel blocked it that same year, finding it diluted the voting power of Black Alabamians^[12]. The block held through the 2024 election, so that race used a court-drawn substitute instead. Then, on April 29, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court reset the legal ground under the whole dispute. It ruled 6-3 in a Louisiana case, Louisiana v. Callais, making claims of racial vote dilution much harder to win^[4]. Alabama went back to court, and on June 2 the justices lifted the injunction on the 2023 map, 6-3, clearing it for use this year^[5][15].

Nothing about Alabama's population changed between those two elections. What changed was the legal test. That fact sits underneath everything else in this story.

The District That Moved Without Anyone Moving

The clearest effect of the switch shows up in the 2nd District, held by Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures. Under the newly restored map, the district's Black population share drops from about half to roughly 40%^[1]. The 7th District, represented by Rep. Terri Sewell, keeps a slim Black majority^[10].

State Rep. Rhett Marques, endorsed by President Trump, won Tuesday's Republican primary in the 2nd District with about 50% of the vote. Hampton Harris came in second with 22%, David Matthews third with 17%, Joshua McKee took 5% and Christian Horn 3%^[3][8]. Marques will face Figures in November, and the National Republican Congressional Committee already rates the seat a likely Republican pickup^[13].

Elsewhere, the results were lopsided. Rep. Jerry Carl won the 1st District Republican primary with 74.7% and will face Democrat Clyde Jones in the fall^[3]. Rep. Gary Palmer took 86.6% in the 6th District GOP primary, while Maurice Mercer won the Democratic side there with 67% to Ashtyn Kennedy's 21%^[9][3]. Figures and Sewell both drew no primary opponents at all^[10]. That pattern is not an accident: an August special primary, held three months after the regular one, tends to favor incumbents with organized campaigns and to draw fewer voters overall^[3][9][10].

Same Lines, Two Honest Descriptions

Here is the tension at the center of this story: both sides can describe the identical map honestly, and reach opposite conclusions, because in Alabama race and party are nearly the same variable. Black Alabamians vote roughly 9-to-1 Democratic. So any line that shifts Black voters out of a district also shifts Democratic voters out of it, and a mapmaker can genuinely be doing both at once.

That collinearity is why the legal fight turned on intent, not just outcome. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has long let plaintiffs win by showing a map's effect dilutes minority voting power, without proving the state meant to do it. Callais changed that. It now requires plaintiffs to show a "strong inference" that a state intentionally drew districts to give minority voters less opportunity because of their race^[4]. Proving what was in a legislature's head is far harder than proving what a map does on paper — legislators rarely put that reasoning in writing. The same 2023 Alabama map that lost under the old, effects-based test survives under the new, intent-based one.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall frames that shift as a correction, not a loophole. "The Court has shut the door on vote-dilution claims that use racial data to disguise what are really partisan disputes," he said^[17]. His argument is that the 14th Amendment bars the government from sorting voters by race, and that a rule forcing states to hit a specific Black-population target in a district is exactly that kind of sorting. Partisan map-drawing, by contrast, has long been legal — courts have generally left it to voters and legislatures to sort out, not judges. Marshall's case is that a court finding of "racially polarized voting" describes party preference, not race, and that Alabama followed the process correctly: it lost at the lower court, appealed, and the Supreme Court agreed with it^[5].

Rep. Terri Sewell's response captures the other side's view of that same ruling. She called it "unacceptable" that a state can now cite "a legitimate partisan reason" for a map that discriminates against minorities^[7]. The arithmetic behind her argument: Alabama is roughly 27% Black, but under the restored map, Black voters can realistically elect a candidate of their choice in just one of the state's seven districts — about 14% of the delegation^[11]. Voting rights litigants add that nothing about the underlying facts changed; a federal panel already found this specific map intentionally diluted Black voting strength, and only the legal standard for proving that shifted, not the record itself^[12][15].

What's Actually at Stake in One House Seat

Underneath the legal argument is a much blunter one: control of Congress. Both parties expect the U.S. House majority in 2027 to come down to a handful of seats, which is why a single Alabama district was worth a special legislative session, an emergency Supreme Court appeal, and a second primary^[13]. National Republicans count Alabama alongside Florida, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee and Louisiana in a mid-decade redistricting push, adding up to roughly 16 seats gained against about six for Democrats nationally^[13]. For Alabama Democrats, the 2nd District is a seat Figures flipped in 2024 under the old court-drawn lines, and losing it would also close off, for now, a legal path back to a second Black-opportunity district in the state^[15].

Alabama's own election officials, for their part, describe a more mundane problem: ballots, precinct assignments and candidate qualifying all had to be redone on short notice after the legislature acted in a special session that began May 4^[6]. NPR reported confusion among both voters and candidates about which district they were now in and why they were voting again in August^[7]. One outlet, India's Sunday Guardian, reported turnout at roughly 11% of Alabama's 3.8 million registered voters — a figure that conflicts with the roughly 4.5% turnout other Alabama outlets reported for this particular special primary^[16].

How Newsrooms Told the Same Story Differently

Coverage of Tuesday's vote split largely along the same lines as the underlying legal fight. The Associated Press led with the verified outcome and called the map "redrawn," staying close to the bare facts^[10]. Fox News folded Alabama into a national seat count, describing the 2nd District mainly as a seat Republicans "hope to flip," with the map's effect on Black voters largely absent from the piece^[13]. NPR's headline foregrounded voter "confusion" and "concerns about low turnout" before naming a single result^[7]. NBC News described the ruling as one that "eliminates a majority-Black district" — an accurate description of the effect, but one that state courts and the Supreme Court majority did not adopt as their own stated rationale^[15].

Outside the U.S., Al Jazeera framed the story for international readers as a "redistricting re-do," compressing the legal history into a state asking permission to reuse a map its own judges had called discriminatory, while summarizing the equal-protection counterargument in a single sentence^[11]. Democracy Docket, a left-leaning advocacy outlet founded by a Democratic election lawyer, went furthest, calling the ruling a "racial gerrymander" in its own voice and forecasting "free rein for states to discriminate" — a conclusion the ruling itself doesn't state^[14]. No outlet across this spectrum, and no side in the dispute, has challenged Tuesday's actual vote counts.

What Happens Next

The legal fight is not over. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the three-judge panel to reconsider under the new Callais standard, and further rulings are possible^[5]. But that process will not finish before November. Whatever a court eventually decides about the underlying question, the map used on August 11 is the one that will elect Alabama's delegation seated in January 2027 — Marques against Figures in the 2nd District, Carl against Jones in the 1st, and the rest already effectively decided^[3].