There is not one independent poll in this race

There have been three polls. Here they are. June 8 and 9. Peak Insights. Four hundred likely Republican primary voters, interviewed by text. It found Rhett Marques leading the Republican field. The memo does not name who paid for it. June 22 to 25. IMPACT Research, a Democratic firm. Four hundred likely voters. Marques 45, Figures 44. July 29 and 30. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's own analytics department. Four hundred twenty-one likely voters. Figures 46, Marques 46. No university has polled this district. No newspaper or television station has polled this district. Nobody without a stake in the answer has asked these voters anything. We are including our own side in that. The June poll that had Marques ahead does not disclose a client either. A poll with no named sponsor is worth exactly what a poll with a named partisan sponsor is worth, and we are not going to hold theirs to a standard we skip for ours.

"MULTIPLE PUBLIC POLLS"

When the tie number came out, the DCCC's spokesman said multiple public polls make it clear this is a toss-up race, plain and simple.

Count them. There are two. One is the DCCC's. The other is a Democratic pollster's, and the DCCC's own press release links back to the DCCC's own earlier post about it as the corroborating evidence.

That is not multiple public polls. That is a committee citing itself twice and calling it a consensus.

Public and independent are not the same word. Those polls are public in the sense that the people who commissioned them chose to publish them.

WHAT THEY RELEASED, AND WHAT THEY DID NOT

The DCCC published a two-page memo. We read it.

It gives four things: 421 likely voters, July 29 and 30, phone and text-to-web interviews, and a margin of error of 4.8 points.

It does not give the questions. There is no instrument, no toplines, no crosstabs, and no wording for the ballot test.

That last one matters more than everything else in the memo. In a district that leans Republican, the single biggest thing you can do to a head-to-head number is decide whether to tell the respondent which party each man belongs to. Ask people to choose between two names and you get one answer. Ask them to choose between a Democrat and a Republican and you get another.

Nobody outside that committee knows which question they asked. They did not say, and no reporter has been given the chance to check.

The Marques campaign called it a push poll. On the published record there is no way to prove or disprove that, which is itself the point.

THEIR OWN MEMO, READ CAREFULLY

We would rather quote them than characterize them.

The memo states that under the new lines, fifty-six percent of residents are Figures' existing constituents.

Fifty-six. Their number, not ours, chosen by them and presented as reassurance. Which means forty-four percent of the people in this district are not his constituents and never have been.

The memo also says Figures is known by over half the district.

He has been the congressman here since January of 2025. His own party's campaign arm is presenting the fact that slightly more than half the district knows who he is as a strength.

THEY WROTE DOWN HOW THEY INTEND TO WIN

The memo is specific about the path, and it is worth reading because it is not a secret and it is not a smear to repeat it.

Montgomery County is thirty percent of this district. Figures carried it by thirty-one points in 2024. Black voters are forty percent of the voting-age population, nearly half of them in Montgomery County. The memo names campus mobilization at Alabama State and Tuskegee, and turnout increases following the Supreme Court's voting rights decision.

That is a turnout plan. It is a serious one, it is written down, and it does not depend on persuading a single person who is already voting.

THE PART THAT CUTS THE OTHER WAY

Two numbers in that memo are bad for us and we are not going to bury them.

Figures posts a plus-fourteen job approval rating. Whatever else is true, the people who know him do not dislike him.

And in the same poll, Doug Jones leads Tommy Tuberville by 48 to 45 inside these district lines. Jones carried this ground once before, against Roy Moore in 2017.

Both of those come with the same caveat as the topline: they are the DCCC's numbers, from the DCCC's unreleased instrument. But we are not going to quote the parts we like and skip the parts we do not.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY KNOWN

Strip out everything that was paid for and here is what is left.

Marques was measured at thirty-one percent name identification in June. Whoever paid for the polls, that is a real finding about a real candidate, and it was taken before he was the nominee.

Forty-four percent of this district has never been represented by Shomari Figures.

Turnout in the August 11 special primary was low.

An undefined candidate, voters who have never been asked, and a district that did not show up three weeks ago are not a persuasion problem. They are an introduction and turnout problem, and no poll from either side changes what has to be done about it.

SIXTY-FOUR DAYS

They have written down their plan. It runs through Montgomery County and two campuses, and it does not require changing one Republican's mind.

Ours has to run through everybody else.

Sixty-four days.

Wall of Shame — Today: Regions Financial

Today on the Wall of Shame: the Regions Financial Corp. PAC (Birmingham) has put $10,000 into Rep. Shomari Figures' campaign account — Alabama's largest bank, and the biggest single corporate check Figures has taken. The Wall of Shame exists for one reason — so that total stops growing. https://take2back.com/wall-of-shame.html