Defying Political Stereotypes, Tabitha Isner MPP’09 Runs for Congress in Alabama

Always active politically, Harris Public Policy graduate Tabitha Isner MPP’09, like so many women across the country, has decided to jump from the sidelines into the middle of the action. However, unlike most first-time candidates, who start at the local level, Isner is aiming for the big leagues, competing for a heavily-contested seat in the United States House of Representatives from Alabama’s 2nd District.

About 80 women are campaigning in gubernatorial races. There are 50 women running for seats in the United States Senate. Nearly 400 women, including Isner, have filed or are expected to file for U.S. Representative elections.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. A recent Washington Post article noted that since Election Day 2016, Emily’s List, an organization that helps to support female Democratic candidates, reports being contacted by more than 26,000 women interested in running for office.

While Isner says she has always played a supporting role in politics, her first campaign as a candidate defies political stereotypes.

Tabitha Isner is a deeply religious Alabaman – and she’s a Democrat. In a state that has recently seen Republicans like Senate candidate Roy Moore campaigning on a platform with overt religious messages, some outside of Alabama may be forgiven for assuming that believers in the state tend toward Christian conservatism.

But that’s not all: this Christian Democrat is running in southern Alabama, a Republican stronghold that includes Montgomery and the southeast corner of the state bordering Georgia and Florida.

Isner sees no contradiction between her Christian faith and her Democratic politics. Instead, she sees a natural melding of beliefs and principles. In fact, she has made her religious background and perspective a centerpiece of her candidacy.

“I'm a very religious person and an ordained minister, and I’m married to an ordained minister. And, for a lot of people, the minute they see Christian politician, they assume Republican,” Isner said. “But then reading about the kind of things that I care about, people think Democrat.”  

Isner intentionally omits any mention of party affiliation on her campaign website.  

“I wanted to basically have a website that I felt clearly communicates Democratic values and yet didn't say Democrat,” Isner said. “I wanted to point out the tension there and the assumptions that we make. I think that speaks a lot to our society, where people on both sides of the aisle like what I'm saying, but they're not willing to be all the way in until they know I'm on their ‘team’,” she added.

In a way, it was assumptions about politics and religion that steered her toward Harris.

While working on a 2004 campaign, Isner’s fellow campaign workers would repeatedly say, "We could win this if it weren't for the Christians."

Her rebuttals that she was a Christian and that there were, in fact, many Christians on the political left, were typically met with skepticism and remarks like, "No, no. You're not a real Christian. You know what we mean."

“It broke my heart,” said Isner, who otherwise found the campaign an enjoyable, fulfilling experience.

Not long after, Isner enrolled at University of Chicago to pursue dual master’s degrees in public policy and divinity. She said she did so to “really dig deeper into the question of how people of faith get better when it comes to talking about their beliefs and putting those kinds of Jesus values into good policy.”

“My intention was faith-based advocacy work when I came to the University of Chicago,” Isner said. “I tried working for faith-based organizations and found that they didn't always care about good sound policy. Then, I tried working for political firms that focused on appealing to religious voters, and they had me twisting my faith to serve very partisan purposes.”

“Suffice it to say, I was disenchanted,” she added.

“I wasn't sure what I was going to do with my life and then, during my last semester at Harris, I took program evaluation and was just head over heels for it. This is where it's at. You can crunch the numbers and get an answer and know if a policy solution works. That's amazing!”

Isner particularly appreciated the Harris’ focus on behavioral economics and the idea that not everyone is a rational actor, a standard assumption of classical economics.

“If you want to make really good policy, you've got to recognize that people are not always rational. We're very emotional beings and you have to speak to that emotional side of things if you want people to do what's best for them,” said Isner.

After Harris, Isner was a Research Analyst at Child Trends and worked as a Strategic Planner for the State of Minnesota. Isner is a relative newcomer to Alabama, having moved there two years ago from Minnesota, and she felt that with everything going on in the country -- politically and socially -- she could no longer sit on the sidelines.

She is hoping to put her understanding of data-driven policy, behavioral economics, and emotional decision-making to work for the voters of Alabama, where she is competing for the 2nd Congressional District, a seat currently held by Republican Martha Roby.

“The tone of politics has really changed and things that used to be unacceptable for politicians are now pretty common. I think that notion of statesmanship and wanting to have political leaders who are pillars of integrity and character is a notion worth fighting for,” said Isner.

In addition to the national state of politics, Isner found that civic participation was much lower than she expected.

“I was shocked to find how little involvement there was in civic issues. My willingness to be involved quickly propelled me to the front of a number of conversations. Even though I was new to town and new to the community, there just weren't a lot of leaders, particularly progressive leaders talking about issues of the day: fighting for things, pushing back, testifying at the legislature. So, I found myself in more of a leadership role than I expected,” she noted.

It will not be an easy race in a state where, even Isner concedes, the political culture is so Republican that people are afraid to say in public that they are a Democrat because of the potential impact on their livelihood.

But Isner is not letting that deter her. Isner believes that people of Alabama are hungry for a change in the policies, the rhetoric, and political leadership of the state and the country.

“I think that too many of us have assumed for a long time that we could wait and that the arc of the moral universe, while long, eventually bends toward justice. So, we just have to wait for that bend. Now, I think a lot of us are beginning to think it might bend towards justice, but it's not bending fast enough. So, I'm going to reach up and grab on, and you grab on, too, and we're all going to bend it faster. Because we can't sit around and wait this long.”

Isner hopes that her willingness to jump into the fray, along with the growing wave of political activism among women nationwide, inspires more young women to do the same.

“We have to start acting as empowered as men do. We have to start seeing ourselves as qualified and ready to do this work. I think women have been told that we need to be excessively prepared for something before we do it. We have to stop thinking like that. We should not let our desire for perfection get in the way of liberating the people around us. The world can't wait for us to feel qualified. They need us to lead now,” said Isner.