Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
As the 2024 election nears, theGrio’s Downballot series explores the issues, races and individual candidates appearing on the ballots in state and local elections.
Open on a primly dressed mom-next-door type wearing pearl earrings and a remarkably unremarkable shopping smock. In front of a slightly out-of-focus Piggly Wiggly sign, the woman strolls through a supermarket parking lot with two children in tow. She stops and begins speaking.
“Prices keep rising, forcing Alabama families to make tough choices,” she laments as she opens the tailgate of a nondescript, stripped-down pickup truck and loads her groceries. “Growing up on a farm, we worked all day and had to stay on budget. That’s no longer possible for hardworking families.”
Cut to an overhead shot at a second location. The same Piggly Wiggly parking lot economist pumps overpriced fuel into the 25-year-old family pickup that she probably calls “Betsy.”
“Let’s bring down high prices and make life affordable again,” the struggling, small-town mom concludes as the screen fades to white.
This is “Tough Choices,” the first general election campaign ad for Caroleene Dobson, the very demure, very Republican candidate competing against Democrat Shomari Figures for Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District seat in Congress.
Since winning the GOP primary, Dobson, who is extremely conservative and white, has repeatedly cast Figures, who just may be the Blackest “Black candidate” on the 2024 ballot, as a carpetbagging “Washington insider” who stands in direct contrast to her Southern, small-town (pronounced “why-it”) upbringing. In the Dobson cinematic universe, she is a regular old country girl raised on a “small family farm” held by five generations of Alabama farmers. At the same time, Figures is an…
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