Voters in four of Alabama’s seven congressional districts cast ballots in a special primary election on Tuesday, months after the state’s regular primary took place in May, in a vote reshaped by a last-minute US Supreme Court intervention into the state’s congressional map.
Primaries for all seven congressional districts were originally scheduled for 19 May, but Republican Governor Kay Ivey postponed the contests for the 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th Congressional Districts following a US Supreme Court decision that prompted a handful of Republican-controlled Southern states to throw out their congressional maps.
Alabama Primary Election Results 2026 Live: Why Was Alabama’s Regular Primary Split In Two?
The US Supreme Court’s order allowed Alabama to discard the congressional map that lower courts had previously ordered into use for this year’s elections, permitting the state to revert instead to a 2023 map that courts had earlier struck down as a violation of the Voting Rights Act.
Alabama’s regular primary had already begun, with absentee ballots being cast, when the ruling came down, prompting Ivey to swiftly call a special legislative session and lawmakers to pass legislation authorising an entirely new election for the affected congressional and state Senate seats.
Ivey framed the decision as a matter of state sovereignty over redistricting. “I will continue to say: Alabama knows our state, our people and our districts best,” Ivey said in a statement announcing the special election, adding, “The United States Supreme Court’s decision is plain common sense and enables our values to be best represented in Congress.”
Alabama Primary Election Results 2026 Live: What Changed In The Newly Redrawn Districts?
The reversion to the older map carries significant consequences for the state’s Black representation in Congress. Alabama drew new boundaries for the four affected districts, eliminating one of the state’s two majority-Black districts currently represented by Democrats, according to PBS News’s live results coverage.
The 2nd and 7th Districts are held by Black Democrats, while the 1st and 6th Districts, which neighbour them, are held by Republicans, meaning all four contested seats sit at the heart of the map’s redrawn boundaries.
The underlying legal dispute traces back to a ruling that Alabama had illegally diluted the political power of Black voters by maintaining only one majority-Black congressional district out of seven in a state where more than a quarter of residents are Black, with a three-judge panel finding the state should have “two districts in which Black voters either comprise a voting-age majority or something quite close to it.”
Alabama Primary Election Results 2026 Live: How Does This Fit Into A Wider Redistricting Battle Across The South?
Alabama’s mid-cycle map reversal was not an isolated case. The court-inspired actions in Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee, alongside earlier legislative moves in other states to redraw their boundaries mid-decade, formed part of a nationwide Republican effort championed by US President Donald Trump to maximise the party’s chances of holding its slim US House majority.
The same week Alabama lawmakers approved their new primary plan, Virginia’s Supreme Court dealt Democrats a significant setback by overturning a redistricting plan that could have helped them win as many as four additional House seats, while Republican lawmakers in Louisiana and South Carolina pursued their own competing redistricting plans. Analysts estimated Republicans could gain as many as 14 seats nationally from the various new maps under consideration, while Democrats believed they could offset that with gains of up to six seats elsewhere.
Alabama Primary Election Results 2026 Live: What Happens After Tuesday’s Vote?
Governor Ivey set the special primary for 11 August 2026 with no runoff election, meaning Tuesday’s results will determine the nominees who advance directly to the general election, scheduled to take place alongside all other races on 3 November 2026. With ballots being counted across the four contested districts, both parties are watching closely to see how the redrawn boundaries reshape the partisan and racial composition of Alabama’s congressional delegation heading into November’s midterms.
