Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump, waves on the big screen as he attends the Alabama Crimson Tide versus Georgia Bulldogs college football game at Bryant-Denny Stadium on September 28, 2024 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Trump attended the college football game in Tuscaloosa ahead of his intended campaign rally in key battleground state Georgia on Sept. 30. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Donald Trump’s appearance in Tuscaloosa last month was less a campaign stop than an extended cameo. He appeared before thousands of Crimson Tide fans in a tie with the red of the University of Georgia; he left before halftime. As far as I can tell, he said nothing public about the campaign or plans for Alabama.
That’s what happens in our state during presidential elections. We’re lucky to get a hand wave from the national campaigns.
But there was one exception.
In 1980, Jimmy Carter started his re-election campaign in Tuscumbia, at a Labor Day picnic that drew between 20,000 and 40,000 workers.
He talked about inflation and energy independence and highlighted the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority in bringing power to Alabama and Tennessee.
The following month, Ronald Reagan made a speech in Birmingham to about 3,000 people, criticizing Carter’s economic policies and calling for income tax cuts.
It wasn’t that Alabama was special, exactly. The Deep South was up for grabs after Carter swept the region in 1976. White southerners’ traditional bonds to the Democratic Party, frayed for years, had begun to snap.
But the race in Alabama turned out to be close. Reagan took the state by about 17,000 votes out of 1.2 million cast. (Carter won Colbert County, home of Tuscumbia.)
Forty-four years later, that result remains an outlier. Both Reagan and Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale came through the state in 1984, but it was a meaningless exercise: Reagan won Alabama by over 300,000 votes that year.
Since then, Alabama has supported Republican presidential candidates. If a nominee of either party shows up here after Labor Day, it’s because they’re fundraising or trying to get a U.S. Senate candidate elected. Trump’s appearance had its eyes on a rally planned in Georgia two days later.
That dynamic won’t change anytime soon, barring the Atlanta metro area getting catapulted over the Georgia border. Demographic trends in our state – particularly age – favor Republicans. If Alabama should become a swing state, the GOP will be facing a national wipeout.
But after reading about states that are up for grabs, I wondered what it would mean for Alabama to become competitive.
Swing state voters hear plenty of messages that people around the country would like hear on the economy, abortion access and immigration. But candidates also talk about issues of intense local interest.
Like fracking. Blasting natural gas out of the ground with water, chemicals and sand touches on questions of energy independence and environmental stability. But it’s a central question in the presidential election because Pennsylvania is a swing state where fracking makes up a significant part of the state economy.
A presidential candidate campaigning in Alabama would have plenty of local problems to speak about.
A campaign could hold an event at a closed hospital in the Black Belt. Or meet with young mothers and their children, talking about the hours-long drive it took them to deliver the babies now sitting on their laps.
Maybe we could get more eyes on environmental damage in our state, whether from road construction or mines.
Or we’d hear talk about the rampant gun violence in Alabama and its contributions to our suicide rate.
Attention doesn’t always lead to solutions, and it’s easy to envision stupid ideas getting elevated. A presidential nominee could hold a town hall here where someone solemnly declares that bubble gum is Marxist.
But two candidates running in the state means you have to go out of those bubbles and addressing Alabama reality. And if presidential candidates do that, it makes it a lot harder for our elected state officials to ignore problems, or wage campaigns turning on who loves Donald Trump the most.
For now, it’s just a fantasy. The way the Electoral College works, Alabama’s nine votes get thrown into the pile. No one has to work for them.
So here’s how you get that national attention: Get rid of the Electoral College.
Yeah, it’s not going to happen anytime soon. And there are many other reasons to oppose the Electoral College. It’s not democratic. It allows a few thousand voters in a handful of states to nullify the will of millions of Americans. It’s not an approach any other democracy in the world uses.
In a popular vote system – an actual one, not the cosmetic contest we have now – the winning candidate would need to secure at least a plurality of the vote. That encourages campaigns to get every vote they can.
Which means driving turnout. Which means going to your bastions of support.
You’d see Republican candidates a lot more. They’d be in Scottsboro, Alabaster, Daphne and Guntersville, holding rallies and (hopefully) talking about issues affecting those communities.
But you’d see Democrats, too. They’d be in the cities and the Black Belt, meeting people and speaking about the same issues, too, trying to get their base out.
And our going-through-the-motions presidential contest, where four out of every 10 votes are effectively meaningless, would give way to the real concerns of Alabamians.
Alabama wouldn’t be any less Republican under this system. But it would be a lot more important. And, maybe, that attention would mean a spotlight on the issues that plague the state. And, we could hope, the resources to address them.
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