A Look at Alabama's Seven Congressional Elections from 2016
Introduction: The 2016 House elections overall may have been a relative wash, but that doesn't mean there were some interesting or unique results from across the country. For example, three Minnesota Democrats narrowly won re-election in largely-White and rural House seats whose area significantly moved towards Donald Trump. Meanwhile, incumbent Republicans in largely-suburban seats easily won re-election despite their districts trending heavily towards Hillary Clinton, and even voting for her (Kondik). Across the country in Alabama came several other interesting House election results, including an unusually close re-election for a Republican incumbent in what should have been an easy victory, and three incumbents facing no major-party opposition. Today's post will detail all of these races, with an extensive focus on the former due to it being abnormal for the region and time period.
Visual 1: Alabama's U.S. House District Lines, 2013-2021
Base Image Source: "File:Alabama Congressional Districts, 113th Congress.tif." Wikimedia Commons, 31 Jan. 2014, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alabama_Congressional_Districts,_113th_Congress.tif. National Atlas of the United States, United States Department of the Interior. Accessed 16 Apr. 2021.
Visual 2: 2016 Alabama House and Presidential Results by County
Note: County-level results refer to the combined vote totals for all Congressional districts within each county. For example, Montgomery County is split between three districts (the 2nd, 3rd, and 7th). All votes from both parties together, House Democratic candidates won Montgomery County's vote.
Data Sources: "State of Alabama Canvass" (percentages were self-calculated)
Table 1: 2016 Alabama House and Presidential Results by Congressional District
Notes: Congressional candidates with "Rep." in front indicate incumbents, while bolded and italicized names indicate winners per Congressional race. For Presidential election results, "Write-In/Other" results combine the totals for candidates Gary Johnson (Libertarian), Jill Stein (Green), and Write-In votes, while the statewide winner is bolded and italicized.
Data Source: "Daily Kos Elections," "State of Alabama Canvass" (percentages were self-calculated)
2016 Presidential and House Results: As expected, Donald Trump (R) easily won Alabama in 2016, taking around 63% of the vote to Clinton's 35%. At the House level, the partisan composition remained unchanged with 6 Republicans and 1 Democrat, and every district voted for the same party in both the Presidential and Congressional elections (Table 1) .
District-by-District Rundown (North to South): I normally go in numerical or alphabetical order when discussing a list of legislative districts or seats, but this will be an exception because I want to save the best for last (you'll see why), and it happens to relate to the southern part of Alabama. Note that on the county maps below displaying results by district, some counties are labeled with an asterisk (*), which indicates that the result in that county is only for that district's portion of the county. I haven't yet learned how to create Congressional district lines in Tableau yet, hence why I'll be using a slightly-modified county map instead.
Visual 3: 2016 AL-5 House Results by County
Data Source: "State of Alabama"
AL-5: Starting in the Northern part of the Yellowhammer State is AL-5, which contains the cities of Huntsville and Decatur. In 2016, incumbent Rep. Mo Brooks (R) won another term against Democrat Will Boyd. Rep. Brooks recently announced that they will vacate AL-5 to try for Alabama's Class 3 Senate seat, which is open due to Sen. Richard Shelby (R)'s expected retirement. Previously, Rep. Brooks tried for the Republican nomination in the 2017 Special Senate election, but did not make it to the nomination ("Firebrand").
Visual 4: 2016 AL-4 House Results by County
Data Source: "State of Alabama"
AL-4: Stretching across a swath of north-central Alabama, this mostly rural- and small-city-based seat is among the most Republican in the country. In 2016, Rep. Robert Aderholt (R) ran without major-party opposition.
Visual 5: 2016 AL-6 House Results by County
Data Source: "State of Alabama"
AL-6: Ringing around Birmingham to encompass its wealthy and majority-White suburbs, and some surrounding areas, AL-6 is also very Republican. In 2016, Rep. Gary Palmer (R) won another term over Democrat David Putnam.
Visual 6: 2016 AL-3 House Results by County
Data Source: "State of Alabama"
AL-3: Encompassing a large swath of eastern Alabama, including the cities of Auburn and Talladega, AL-3 is also a fairly Republican district. In 2016, Rep. Mike Rogers (R) won another term over Democrat Jesse Smith. Other than Rep. Roby's district (we'll get to that later), this was the only Republican-held district in Alabama where the Democratic candidate won at least one whole county; in this case, Smith won majority-Black Macon County, which voted heavily for Obama (both times), Clinton, and Biden. Smith also narrowly lost neighboring Russell County (lower-right of Macon), which is also largely-Black and narrowly voted for both Biden and Clinton.
Visual 7: 2016 AL-7 House Results by County
Data Source: "State of Alabama"
AL-7: Since 2011, AL-7 has been the only Democratic-held House district in Alabama, as this VRA-compliant district is majority-Black, and is extremely Democratic. Among the areas within the district include Tuscaloosa (home to the University of Alabama), majority-Black parts of Birmingham and Montgomery, Selma, and several rural majority-Black counties. Multiple normally-Republican-voting counties are also located in the district, but their electoral effect on the district is minor due to their small population. The district is also known for its extreme lack of two-party competitiveness, as current incumbent Rep. Terri Sewell (D) hasn't faced a Republican since 2012! ("House Map - Election 2012"; "House Election Results 2014"; "Alabama Election Results 2016; "House Election Results 2018"; "House Election Results 2020") This includes 2016, where the only opposition was a scattering of write-in votes, as seen in Table 1 above.
Visual 8: 2016 AL-1 House Results by County
Data Source: "State of Alabama"
AL-1: At the southern tip of Alabama is AL-1, which in addition to Mobile contains some beach and vacation towns in neighboring Baldwin County, and several rural counties to the north and northeast. In 2016, incumbent Rep. Bradley Byrne (R) won without major-party opposition. Subsequently, he retired in 2020 to vie for the Alabama Senate Republican nomination, but like Rep. Brooks in 2017, failed to make it past the first round. The seat was won last November by Jerry Carl (R), a Mobile County Commissioner (Sharp).
Visual 9: 2016 AL-2 House Results by County
Data Source: "State of Alabama"
AL-2: As promised, the most abnormal and fascinating 2016 U.S. House race from Alabama is saved for last. In its current form, AL-2 contains most of Southeastern Alabama including parts of Montgomery, a large swath of rural and small-city majority-White territory, and a small portion of the "Black Belt." As a brief history behind why this district saw an extremely abnormal 2016 House result, in 2008, conservative Democrat Bobby Bright (then the Mayor of Birmingham) narrowly won the district after longtime incumbent Tony Everett (R) retired. Before then, the district had been in Republican hands since the 1960s (Elliot). However, Bright's first term did not translate into a second despite the incumbent bucking the party on the controversial ACA and generally being socially-conservative. In contrast to his conservative image, he supported House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) (which later haunted him again in 2018, below) and voted for the 2009 spending bill that garnered little Republican Congressional support. These decisions and the 2010 environment rapidly caught up to him, as he (narrowly) lost that year to Montgomery Councilmember Martha Roby (R) (Cliff). Rep. Roby ended up easily winning two more terms in the post-2010 Census version of AL-2 before the 2016 cycle came about.
Visual 10: 2016 Alabama U.S. House Write-In % by County
Data Source: "State of Alabama"
Despite a spirited primary challenge by Tea Party favorite Becky Gerritson (R), Rep. Roby successfully cleared the primary (Troyan, "Dumping"). Her fortunes changed significantly when the Access Hollywood tape against then-Presidential nominee Donald Trump (R) emerged that October. Rep. Roby came out in heavy opposition to Trump, even going as far as urging him to withdrawal his campaign, something that (unexpectedly, considering its very-red tint) angered many conservative voters in the district (Gattis). Because of this, a conservative-led write-in campaign was launched against her, with Gerritson being the campaign's main write-in candidate despite the state party's rules against primary election "sore losers" running in general elections (Troyan, "Martha"). All of the write-in votes (Gerritson and others) in AL-2 received around 11% of the vote, with higher write-in support correlating with higher Trump electoral performance at the county-level (Visuals 2 and 10). The write-in campaign against her caused Rep. Roby to win re-election with only 48% of the vote, an 8% margin over farmer and State Representative Nathan Mathis (D) (Table 1), who had previously run for both parties (Hannon). Rep. Roby's winning margin ran almost 25% behind Trump's in AL-2 (Table 1), thus showcasing the extent of his popularity and her decline in conservative support due to her opposition to the Presidential nominee. To illustrate this, in the counties located along the AL-FL border, which from west to east are Covington, Geneva, and Houston (Dothan), Roby's winning margin was over 35% behind Trump's! Note the correlation between this and the high levels of write-in support in this region, which likely illustrates the extent to which the write-in campaign negatively impacted Rep. Roby's 2016 campaign. While I did not make a map of the county-level write-in results for the rest of the state, only AL-7's Pickens County (west of Tuscaloosa County) saw a write-in percentage anywhere near as high as AL-2 (5.2%; self-calculated) ("State of Alabama").
On the Democratic side, Mathis ran ahead of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton (D) throughout the district, but not enough to pull off an upset victory. Had this happened, AL-2 would have been the most Republican district held by a House Democrat, as Donald Trump won AL-2 by 32% and took 65% of its vote (Table 1). In reality, after 2016, the only House Democrat occupying a district that Republican was MN-7's Rep. Collin Peterson (D), whose district voted for Trump by 30.8% after swinging heavily compared to 2016 (Kondik). A year later, Mathis attended a Roy Moore rally to express opposition to the controversial Republican, who was the nominee for the 2017 Special Senate election. In particular, Mathias criticized Moore's anti-LGBTQ+ views, as Mathis's daughter had committed suicide as a lesbian; he had previously expressed anti-gay views as well (Hannon).
After Trump settled into his presidential term, Rep. Roby warmed to him as she faced a difficult primary two years later against ex-Rep. Bright, who had changed parties. After President Trump endorsed her, she defeated Bright once again (Bland). After winning her fourth term, she decided to retire from the seat in 2020, which was won by state legislator Barry Moore (R) (Beck).
Twitter Poll: Last Thursday evening, I made a Twitter poll asking whether Mathis would have won another term in 2018 if he had (somehow) won AL-2 in 2016, all else held equal. After reading the content above, if you would like, feel free to vote here before the poll closes this coming Friday!
Conclusion: For the reasons discussed above, if Mathis had pulled off an upset victory against Roby, it would have been one of the most significant Congressional results of the previous decade. Looking at 2014-2020 House election results, this has been the only instance since 2014 that a largely non-urban and majority-White Southern district where Donald Trump received 55% of the vote (either time) has come within 10% of voting for a Democrat in a regular Congressional election. A semi-exception (that also had unusual circumstances) was the 2017 special election in SC-5, which contains some of Charlotte's southern exurbs and a significant amount of rural and small-town territory, some of it part of the "Black Belt." In that year's election, Democrat Archie Parnell almost won the seat against Republican Ralph Norman. While the final result in SC-5 was narrow, it is important to note that overall turnout was very low in the district that gave 55% to Trump in 2016 (Nir; "Norman"). Nonetheless, even in a year where Democrats were generally disappointed at the House results, due to failing to flip many districts they targeted, the unusually close AL-2 election stands out as a significant sore thumb despite the unusual dynamics of the race.
