Tabitha Isner at a town hall event last month in Montgomery.Credit...Glenna Gordon for The New York Times

Feature

Struggling to Bring the ‘Blue Wave’ to Deep-Red Alabama

Tabitha Isner has been trying to make a nearly impossible sales pitch to voters — and to the national donor class.

Tabitha Isner’s campaign office in Dothan, Ala., is a modest one-story bungalow next to a dog-grooming shop, just across the street from the Shade Tree Mobile Homes Court. When I visited this summer, on a rainy afternoon, the living room was furnished with cheap folding tables and decorated with white boards, homemade posters and a huge Alabama flag. An Instagram-friendly letter-board sign reading GO THE EXTRA MILE was propped on the mantel over a boarded-up fireplace. The candidate herself was getting ready for an event across town, loading up her hybrid hatchback with stacks of fliers and yard signs.

Isner is running for Congress in Alabama’s second district — which includes Dothan, the “peanut capital of the world” — in the state’s rural southeast corner. In a certain light, Isner is a Democrat whose personal story and political instincts seem custom-built for a state like Alabama. She’s an adoptive mother with an expertise in early-childhood education. She’s a child of church workers, the wife of a pastor and an ordained minister herself. She talks about policy “in the pastoral way rather than the academic way,” she told me, to avoid voters’ hangups about jargon. She frames paid parental leave as a matter of family values, and the section of her website devoted to criminal justice starts with the declaration that “we are all sinners.” She was ordained in a Hispanic Pentecostal congregation, and for a white person is notably comfortable with the rhythms of the black church, and in majority-black spaces in general.

Unfortunately for Isner, even in a year of palpable energy among Democrats nationwide, her road to victory is nearly nonexistent. Even people rooting for her know she’s facing overwhelming odds. “She’d probably be electable in almost any other state,” Josh Moon, a liberal columnist in Montgomery, told me. “She’s a smart lady, she cares about people. It’s a shame she is where she is.”

After loading up the car, Isner made her way to a storefront downtown, where cheerful volunteers in blue T-shirts bearing her name were stationed at a table in front. The event was supposed to be a fund-raiser, with a $100 suggested donation. When R.S.V.P.s were still thin only a few days before, Isner and her campaign manager, Megan Skipper, lowered the suggestion to $25 and a promise to volunteer. Finally, they turned it into a standard meet-and-greet: open doors, no charge, free dinner.

To make matters worse, Isner had spent all morning bouncing between calls with the F.B.I. A few days earlier, her web-hosting company alerted her to a spike in traffic on her campaign site. Her webmaster found nearly 1,500 failed attempts to break in to the site, almost all of them from I.P. addresses in Russia. Isner and Skipper were alarmed, but they also figured the hacking was an opportunity for publicity. They emailed some local reporters, and Skipper tweeted at Rachel Maddow — why not? Only a week earlier, the Justice Department had announced indictments against 12 members of a Russian intelligence agency accused of launching a “sustained effort” to hack Democrats’ computer networks.

Before dinner, Isner led a prayer, and then the crowd — 20 or so attendees, plus volunteers, interns and staff members — lined up for bowls of red beans and rice served out of a battered metal pot. They poured sweet tea and lemonade out of plastic gallon jugs. In the corner, Isner did a quick TV hit about the hacking with the local CBS affiliate, WTVY. (She received a brief flurry of national news coverage about the incident, but never learned what the Russian hacking was about. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee provided her campaign with access to an encrypted team-messaging system that she and Skipper started to use for sensitive documents.)

After the crowd dispersed, Isner headed back to her hatchback, carrying a foil pan heaped with leftovers. She had hoped to raise $10,000 between this dinner and a party earlier in the week, but when it was all over, they netted barely a third of that. As she drove the two hours back home to Montgomery, she could see the next few days stretching in front of her: a meet-the-candidate dinner at a supporter’s house on Friday; a luncheon at a church rec hall the next day followed by dinner with a black progressive group called the Butler County Concerned Citizens; a sermon to preach on Sunday morning; a pastor-appreciation ceremony to attend at yet another church on Sunday night. She would be on her feet or in her car until at least 10 every night.

Two years into the Trump presidency, Democrats are heading into a midterm election they predict will be a “blue wave” — a crest they hope will engulf the House of Representatives and maybe even the Senate. Congressional races that would ordinarily be low-profile are drawing national donations and media coverage.

“The battlefield is the largest we’ve seen in at least a decade,” said Tyler Law, national press secretary for the D.C.C.C., which is tasked with recruiting and fund-raising for Democratic candidates for the House. “Candidates who would have struggled in the past to get attention, people are coming in to make phone calls, canvassing, talking to voters. Just the basic infrastructure of a functional campaign, we’re seeing that all over the map, even in deep-red turf.” Only three House races do not have a Democratic candidate this year, compared with 36 in 2014. (By contrast, 39 races do not have a Republican on the ballot this year.)

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Isner at Revelation Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala.Credit...Glenna Gordon for The New York Times

Nationally, organizations that support first-timers running for office have struggled to keep up with the enthusiasm. Run for Something, a group founded last year with the philosophy that progressives should “run everywhere,” recruited more than 15,000 millennials interested in running for local office. More than 42,000 women approached Emily’s List, a group dedicated to supporting Democratic women in politics, with an interest in running this cycle. “It’s a wonderful problem to have, but we have so many Democrats running, and in some seats where Democrats just didn’t run, or didn’t have primaries because it wasn’t winnable, and they all need staff,” said Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at the organization. “You’re looking at a lot of first-time candidates, but also first-time managers and first-time staffers.”

The surge in progressive energy also means that Democrats are running in places where they have not won, or even competed, in recent years — districts like Isner’s, where the party has a weak infrastructure, few resources, a demoralized base and few experienced candidates and campaign staffers. When Donald Trump was elected, both of Alabama’s senators and six of its seven members of Congress were Republicans, along with all 29 elected statewide offices. Republicans took over the State Legislature in 2010, and they now occupy 98 of 140 seats, a supermajority in both chambers. Black voters in the state are generally Democrats, but whites overwhelmingly vote Republican. In conversations over the past six months, white liberals in Alabama again and again compared their experiences to being closeted. “I almost get more [expletive] for being a Democrat than I do for being an openly gay man,” one activist in Dothan told me. Democrats often struggle to scrounge up candidates at all, let alone viable ones.

Last year, there were reasons to believe that AL-2, the seat Isner is running for, was winnable. Since 2016, the state had endured a series of Republican scandals, after which the governor resigned in disgrace, the House speaker was convicted of multiple felony ethics charges and the state Supreme Court chief justice, Roy Moore, was ousted over ethics. Last year, the D.C.C.C. identified the seat’s Republican incumbent, Martha Roby, as the only Alabama representative vulnerable in the midterms. Swing Left, a national hybrid PAC that mobilizes volunteers in congressional districts that Democrats could pick up in 2018, also put AL-2 on its list of 84 competitive seats, the only one in Alabama.

And then there’s Doug Jones. It’s hard to overstate how much the Democrats’ narrow victory over Roy Moore in the special election for Senate last December, by fewer than 21,000 votes, energized liberals within the state. “Since our state has been run by Republicans for 20 years, people were very hesitant to say otherwise,” said Mallory Hagan, a 29-year-old first-time candidate who is the Democratic nominee in the state’s third congressional district, to the northeast of Isner’s. “The Doug Jones race showed us there are a lot of people who think like us, and it’s possible for our state to change.”

The excitement wasn’t just about Jones’s victory; it was about how he won. Black turnout, 96 percent in Jones’s favor, was high — a sign, as Isner sees it, that black voters will turn out for white candidates. Many white conservatives, meanwhile, stayed home after allegations of sexual misconduct by Moore surfaced. Jones lacked real support from the state party, and privately many people told me that he did not actually run a model campaign (a “disorganized mess,” as the Dothan activist put it), but that chaos wound up empowering a new group of independent grass-roots organizers. “The very fact that he didn’t have enough time to put together a field operation in all parts of the state meant people had to put together their own field ops, and they did,” Isner said. “When we went to look for phone-banking volunteers or door knockers, they were people who had done it for Doug.”

David Dinielli, a progressive lawyer in Montgomery, described Jones’s victory as a “microprogression,” a twist on the concept of microaggressions: a small bit of progress, but deeply significant to those who notice it happening. “If things go great in November, I think that will build off the Doug Jones momentum,” said Terri Wiggins, the president of Alabama Young Democrats. “Alabama is like a ship. It’s going to take some years to get things back on track.”

Tremors of momentum felt locally, however, are not always perceptible on the national stage. For candidates like Isner to get traction in competitive races, they have to raise serious money; in order to raise serious money, they have to convince the national party and major donors to open their wallets. “A dollar goes a long way in Alabama,” one of Isner’s donors in New York told me. But in a high-stakes election year, few are willing to spend those dollars on a long-shot effort by an outspoken Christian in the Deep South — even if that happens to be the only kind of Democrat who could possibly flip the seat.

Before their wedding, in 2009, Isner and her husband, Shane, wrote a mission statement for their marriage. Isner sums it up as liberal values emerging from their faith: being stewards of God’s creation, caring for “the least of these” and being open to go where the Holy Spirit leads them. They had other goals too, like adopting children together. Isner had decided as a teenager that she didn’t want to have biological children. “I’m not hung up on a kid needing to look like me,” she said with a shrug. “Kids need homes, and I can love any kid.” By the time she married, she also knew that she wanted to run for office someday.

The couple met in divinity school at the University of Chicago, where she was also working on a master’s degree in public policy. They both went on to pursue ordination in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a mainline Protestant denomination. Their first home was in the suburbs of Minneapolis, where Shane worked at a church and Tabitha worked as a policy analyst for the state, evaluating early-childhood education programs. “She’s like, ‘I see Jesus in fixing school systems,’ ” Shane told me. “I have more of the ‘Let’s go off to a convent and pray’ vibe to me.” In Minneapolis, they became foster parents to a 5-year-old named Tymari, who is black. The boy had serious behavioral issues when he came into their home, and they pursued intensive counseling. The adoption was finalized last year.

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Isner speaks with Lory Gustafson, a campaign volunteer, before a town hall event last month in Montgomery.Credit...Glenna Gordon for The New York Times

By then, the family had moved to Alabama so Shane could take a job as the head pastor of a church on Montgomery’s east side. Tabitha thought she would dip her toe into the political scene gradually, first getting to know local activists and listening in on meetings. She had underestimated what an oddity she would be in Alabama as a white liberal, let alone an ordained one. Local progressive advocacy groups immediately began asking her to speak at hearings and to the press, sometimes in her clerical collar, knowing that her religious bona fides gave her endorsements extra weight. When she met other white progressives, they greeted her with relief, like the newest member of a small and unpopular club. “I knew it was a conservative place,” she said, “but after a while, you start getting the vibe that, like, no, it’s really a thing.” Roy Moore ended up carrying the district by seven points when he lost the state to Jones.

Isner had sketched out a loose 10-year plan to prepare to run for office after the family’s move. Then Donald Trump was elected president. Screw that, she thought. “You’re never prepared. I wasn’t ‘prepared’ for foster care.” Almost all the local offices she was eligible for were already held by black Democrats, but her congressional seat was held by an unpopular Republican, and the Democratic side looked wide open. She figured it was at least worth a try.

Throughout the state, other progressives were having the same reaction. County Democratic Party meetings were suddenly well attended across the state. “When Trump was elected, everyone who was a Democrat or a progressive in the county came out the woodwork,” said Pat Siano, the chairwoman of Organize Alabama, a Democratic group that formed last year to connect smaller grass-roots groups in the state. An Alabama affiliate of Emerge America, which trains women to run for office, also launched last year, and has trained 23 candidates on ballots in the state this fall. “We didn’t have that in 2010 or 2014, a network of women standing behind each other,” said Miranda Joseph, the Democratic candidate for state auditor, who went through the program this spring after running for office twice before.

Isner signed up for a boot camp offered by Emerge, where she learned how to structure a campaign, pursue endorsements and fund-raise. In November, she hired Skipper, a 23-year-old parishioner of Shane’s church who had never been employed by a campaign, as her manager. Skipper graduated this spring from a longer Emerge program that consisted of intensive weekend sessions in fund-raising, using voter-data software and doing interviews with the media. Laura Binford, also 23, came on as Isner’s field director. The campaign secured a free office space from a supportive landlord in a small building across from a Waffle House.

Then came the primary. Isner faced a challenge from Audri Scott Williams, a black peace activist in Dothan who had also undergone training through Emerge. Williams ran an energetic campaign; when I visited Dothan in April, her office was buzzing with volunteers, several of whom were working for her almost full time. But she raised just over $35,000, and never got a foothold in the northern urban part of the district. Isner won the primary in June by a comfortable margin. Williams later endorsed Isner and has appeared with her at a few events. Though a competitive primary sucks up energy and money, Isner’s team was grateful for the practice. “I didn’t know what to do on Election Day,” Skipper said later with a laugh. “What does a war room look like? We all said, ‘Thank God for this trial run.’ ”

Isner and Skipper have each experienced harassment on the campaign trail. At an early-morning meet-and-greet, an older man put his arm around Skipper’s waist without warning. Before she knew what was happening, he dipped his hand beneath her waistband to grab her butt and used his other hand to grope her breast. An older man at a charity event swept Isner into an uncomfortable embrace and called her a “pretty little thing”; a male politician complimented her legs. “She’s a woman in a state that’s as misogynistic as the president,” Wayne Flynt, a historian and an emeritus professor at Auburn University, said. “It’s an asset in most states, but in Alabama we’re still not accustomed to women candidates.”

Around the time of Trump’s inauguration, Isner and her husband sat down for a serious conversation about what running for office would look like for their family. Shane put together a tentative budget, with a plan for shifting their savings patterns and pausing some of their monthly student-loan payments. (“April 15 of 2019,” Shane quickly answered when I asked him when they have to start paying again. “$361.09.”) Isner asked her boss exactly how many hours a week she’d need to work to keep her health insurance; she stepped down to part-time hours this March, and quit altogether in May. The job had paid $95,000 a year, significantly more than Shane’s salary and the most she had ever made. So far, they have spent more than $22,000 of their own savings on the campaign.

Raising money, worrying about money and figuring out how to spend money has taken a surprising amount of Isner’s time as a candidate. “I am not the working poor, and it’s hard for me to run for Congress without bankrupting my family,” she said. “So who can run for Congress without bankrupting their family other than millionaires?” Early on, she participated in a half-day training session offered by Emily’s List that helped her figure out the mechanics of starting a campaign. The first step was to make a list of “every single person you’ve known your whole life,” and figure out how many of them could give you $1,000, or $500, and so on. Isner thought she could raise about $250,000 from friends and family.

That turned out to be a wildly optimistic estimate. She quickly raised about $40,000 in pledges from people she knew, but then plateaued at $60,000. It took until this summer to get to $250,000 from all donors combined. In the meantime, costs kept mounting. Shortly before the primary, she secured a crucial endorsement from the Alabama Democratic Conference, a political organization focused on influencing the black vote. Immediately afterward, the longtime chairman of the caucus, Joe Reed, informed her that she would be expected to pay $15,000 to help distribute voter guides printed with the group’s endorsements. At that point, the charge amounted to 10 percent of all the money she had raised.

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Isner speaks with veterans at a campaign event last month in Dothan, Ala. Her progressive platform includes fixing some of the problems at the V.A.Credit...Glenna Gordon for The New York Times

With only weeks until the primary, the campaign had to figure out how exactly much it could afford. Isner had just spent $30,000 on a radio ad and wasn’t prepared to spend more so quickly. Her lawyer, meanwhile, told her there might be a problem with writing such a large check to a PAC, which Reed’s party-affiliated caucus technically operates as. Skipper and Isner had embarked on a sprint to canvass in all of the district’s 15 counties within 15 days, and they were fielding urgent calls about the payment in areas where they had little cell service. “We joke about the Democratic Party in Alabama being like a vampire, sucking you of all of your resources,” Skipper said with a resigned laugh. “That’s very frustrating, but it’s the way the system has worked so far.”

The condition of Alabama’s state Democratic Party is a subject of constant agony in the area. Almost no young progressives I spoke to in the state had kind things to say about the effectiveness of the state party, which is seen as sclerotic, ineffective and out of touch. “I don’t even know where to start — I can feel my blood pressure going up,” Beth Clayton, the former president of the Alabama Young Democrats, told me. “If we were ever going to have an opportunity to do something, this would be it,” said Matthew Tyson, the president of Calhoun County Young Democrats, referring to the recent cascade of Republican scandals in the state. “We’re not doing anything. I’m frustrated by the fact that the party can’t produce any kind of offense.”

The head of the party is Nancy Worley, a former secretary of state who has been involved in Democratic politics for decades and is a close ally of Reed’s, who heads the black caucus. Worley, who is white, has long been criticized for her failure to fund-raise, to capitalize on Republican scandals and to project the kind of professionalism that ambitious state Democrats want to see at the head of their party. A few years ago, her annual holiday letter to party members and donors included an anecdote about getting stuck on the toilet for several hours, and a request for recipients to resend their contact information because she had broken her phone. “The party has been totally ineffective,” Doug Jones told me. “It existed only in name, and a couple people who just open the doors to the office and answer the phone. They have not helped candidates; they didn’t really recruit candidates, and they were nonexistent during my campaign.” At the state party’s executive committee meeting in August, Jones backed an insurgent campaign from a Montgomery lawyer trying to unseat Worley. But despite Worley’s unpopularity with young progressives, the committee voted to retain her for another four-year term.

Isner learned over time to keep her expectations low when it came to support from Worley and Reed. But meanwhile, she was also getting little support from national Democrats and their donors, who apparently didn’t see her as part of their path to retaking the House. Over the course of the summer, a road that had always been uphill started to look even steeper. In 2017, the D.C.C.C. had identified Roby’s seat as vulnerable. But Isner hasn’t made the more prestigious “Red to Blue” list of candidates whose seats seem truly in play — meaning that money hasn’t flowed into the race, a chicken-and-egg problem that has frustrated Isner. The group had sent a member of its new “expansion pod” to meet with her in the spring, but the meeting didn’t lead to much. “We’re always talking with campaigns, asking, ‘Do you have polling or data that shows things have changed, and there’s a clear path to victory?’ ” said Law, the organization’s press secretary. “We keep a very open mind.” (Isner has declined to release the results of a poll she commissioned.)

By the end of June, Isner had raised just $240,000 to Roby’s $2.2 million. High-profile national groups, including Emily’s List, had declined to boost her candidacy. Skipper indignantly contacted a local news site when a headline after the primary suggested the general election was as good as over: “Martha Roby Wins Fifth Term.” In August, the website FiveThirtyEight estimated that Isner had the best chances of any Democratic congressional candidate competing in the state — and still had just a 2.7 percent chance of winning. (The pollster hired by Isner, Celinda Lake, pushed back at those results. “This is a very difficult district, but this is a place where you could get a surprise,” she said. “[Democrats] don’t know whether we’ll win 23 seats or 43 seats. If we win 43 seats, this could be one of them.”)

It was becoming clear that Isner was not the kind of candidate blue-state progressives were in the mood to fund this year. “Being a super-Christian Democrat works great in Alabama, but it’s a hard sell nationally,” Isner told me. A summer fund-raising trip to San Francisco was promising but didn’t yield many major donations. One donor there asked for a 5 p.m. meeting because he expected others from his law firm would be interested in meeting her, but no one else showed up. In planning the trip, Isner floated the idea of teaming up with Mallory Hagan, the candidate in the state’s third congressional district, who happens to be a former Miss America. The California friend facilitating the trip, a well-connected venture capitalist, blanched at the idea. “We’re not into pageants,” he told her.

Again and again, Isner ran into the disjunct between what national Democrats and out-of-state donors want from her and what she thinks will work in Alabama. “In Alabama, to be an electable Democrat, you have to be a moderate, and that makes hard-core Democrats mad,” Isner said. “You can’t win. Or no one’s figured out yet how to win.” Even within the state, some progressives wish she would stake out firmer positions on the left. “I get regular attacks from Democrats in Alabama saying, ‘Why aren’t you more like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; why aren’t you more like Andrew Gillum [the Democratic candidate for governor of Florida]?’ They won their primaries, so it’s proof you should be more liberal!” She laughed, sounding a little exasperated. “I think, But I won my primary, so isn’t that proof I should be me?”

Most Democrats in Alabama have few alternatives than to seriously court conservative Republicans. Walt Maddox, the Democratic nominee for governor, calls himself anti-abortion and has emphasized his support for the Second Amendment. Isner is pro-choice, though she almost always leads with “every life is sacred” when she talks about the issue. In August, she invited some of her supporters to a pistol range at the Tristate Gun Club in Daleville to film a campaign video in which she received firearms training and talked about gun rights as an issue without “a simple solution.” Some conversations are easier than others, but she always seems comfortable when the conversation turns to faith. “Refusing to talk about it as Democrats means that we give Christianity away,” she said. “If we’re not fighting for it, it’s theirs.”

As the campaign entered its final weeks, Isner continued to campaign as if she might win. She held a fund-raiser in New York City that raised nearly $30,000, wrote an op-ed for a statewide news site about running for office as a woman and held a series of town halls in her district. None of it seemed to change the dynamics of the race.

Isner had tried to make an issue of the fact that Roby rarely holds public town halls and that she has declined to debate her. In a video she posted online over the summer, she did an “impression” of Roby that consisted of Isner disappearing from the screen. Needling Roby for declining to face her opponent or her constituents was a tactic that let Isner critique Roby’s process, rather than her policies or her personality. But the Republican governor, Kay Ivey, has also refused to debate Maddox, which has made Roby less of a target. By October, it looked certain that Roby would indeed not agree to a debate, and would sail to re-election nonetheless.

Shane had told me that he and Isner always talked about her running for office as a calling, in a religious sense. But to them, that didn’t mean God was telling them she was going to win. “God doesn’t control the future,” he said. “So you’re not called to a particular position; you’re not called to win the race. You’re called to be in it.”

Ruth Graham is a staff writer for Slate. She last wrote for the magazine about the controversy over chemical abortion “reversal.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 32 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Alabama Blues. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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