Louise Jones, wife of Doug Jones, and Kalisha Figures, wife of Rep. Shomari Figures, will participate in a fireside chat Thursday, Aug. 6, in Mobile to discuss issues affecting women across Alabama, including affordability and access to health care and maternal care. The event brings two of the state’s most visible political families to a city that has spent the year wrestling with exactly the questions the conversation is designed to raise.
Jones launched her Women for Alabama listening tour last week in Auburn. Mobile is the tour’s second stop — a deliberate reach into south Alabama, where the cost of doctor visits, insurance and maternity care has become one of the most persistent themes of the state’s political conversation.
The event will be held at the Fuse Factory in downtown Mobile, the redeveloped historic building that has become a favored venue for civic gatherings, candidate forums and community conversations in the heart of the city’s government district.
“Every stop on this tour reminds me why Doug and I are in this race,” Jones said. “We’re doing it for women, for working families and for folks desperate for a change and who deserve to be heard.”
A Tour Built on Listening
The listening-tour format signals an emphasis on hearing from voters rather than lecturing them. Fireside chats of this kind have become a staple of Alabama campaigns in recent election cycles, trading the traditional rally for a room where audience members can put questions directly to the people seeking their support. Organizers of such events say the health care and affordability questions come up everywhere — from Huntsville to Mobile — but hit differently in communities with fewer providers.
Maternal care is a defining issue in the state. Rural hospitals across Alabama have closed or curtailed obstetric services in recent years, leaving expectant mothers to drive long distances for prenatal appointments and delivery. Mobile, home to one of the state’s major medical centers, absorbs some of that demand, but residents of the surrounding counties describe the strain of access every time a local service disappears. Those realities give conversations like Thursday’s a concrete edge beyond campaign rhetoric.
Affordability, meanwhile, has emerged as a pocketbook concern that cuts across the state’s demographics — from utility and insurance costs on the Gulf Coast to the price of child care that shapes whether parents can work. For the wives of two prominent figures in Alabama politics, discussing those issues together amounts to a shared stage for overlapping constituencies.
Doug Jones, the former U.S. senator from Alabama, has returned to electoral politics, and Louise Jones’s tour functions as one of the campaign’s principal outreach arms to women voters. The former senator, whose 2017 special election victory was one of the state’s most closely watched races in a generation, has built his political identity around legal and civil rights issues — and the tour’s emphasis on health care and family economics extends that framework into households’ daily budgets.
Kalisha Figures, meanwhile, brings the perspective of a family rooted in south Alabama politics. Her husband, Rep. Shomari Figures, represents the region in Congress after winning election in the redrawn Second Congressional District — a seat created when federal courts required Alabama to draw an additional district where Black voters have the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. His election was among the most consequential results of the state’s redistricting fight.
Mobile will no longer be part of Figures’ congressional district following redistricting, but the Figures family said “the fight for fair representation and protecting marginalized voices in the area will not stop.” The comment acknowledges the political geography: the new district lines moved Mobile out of the Second District, leaving the city represented elsewhere even as the family’s political identity remains tied to south Alabama broadly.
“With our district redrawn and this election more important than ever, I wanted Mobile women to be able to have a real conversation,” Figures said. “When women actually have a say in the decisions and policies that affect their lives, everyone in this state is better off.”
The Fuse Factory, at 200 Government St., sits in the block of downtown Mobile where the city’s civic and cultural life concentrates — near Government Street’s historic churches, the Mobile County courthouses and the neighborhoods that anchor the central business district. Hosting a political conversation there puts it within walking distance of the government offices whose decisions on health funding and family services the discussion touches on.
The event will begin at 5:10 p.m., an early-evening slot designed to catch residents after work rather than compete with the dinner hour. Organizers of downtown civic events have found that timing matters for turnout among the working women such conversations aim to reach — teachers, nurses, city employees and service workers whose schedules make midday events impractical.
The Stakes in South Alabama
Advocates who work on maternal health in the region say the most valuable outcome of public conversations is specificity — naming which hospitals have kept their delivery rooms, which counties have no practicing OB-GYN and which transportation gaps force the hardest choices. General concern for mothers, they note, is universal; the solutions are local, and they begin with the details that only residents, providers and patients tend to know.
For Mobile women, the issues on Thursday’s agenda are not abstractions. The city’s health care landscape includes one of the region’s largest hospital systems, but the surrounding counties tell a thinner story: maternity wards consolidated, clinics reduced to limited hours and specialists concentrated in Mobile and Baldwin counties. Women in Washington, Clarke, Monroe and Escambia counties routinely describe drives of an hour or more for prenatal care, and the loss of any local obstetric service becomes a regional story within days.
The affordability conversation runs alongside it. On the Gulf Coast, insurance costs — homeowners’ policies above all — weigh on household budgets in a way few other states can match, and child care costs in Mobile have risen faster than wages in many sectors. Those are the kitchen-table economics that listening tours are designed to hear about directly, and the figures gathered at events like this one often find their way into the policy platforms that follow.
Thursday’s chat also lands in the middle of an election season in which Alabama’s congressional map, its statewide offices and its legislative races all draw sharper attention than usual. The presence of both the Jones and Figures families signals an effort to knit together the statewide and congressional campaigns into a single narrative for south Alabama voters — one that runs through women’s concerns first.
For the organizers, the measure of the event will be less the speeches than the exchanges: the questions from the floor about a closed maternity ward, a utility bill, a child care waitlist. Listening tours succeed when the listening is real, and both speakers have staked their messaging on exactly that premise — that the fastest way to understand what Alabama women need is to give them a room, a microphone and an honest hour.
The Mobile stop follows the tour’s launch in Auburn, where the same format drew questions about health care access, wages and the cost of raising children in a state whose rural-urban divide shapes all three. Coming to Mobile second puts the tour in the state’s largest city outside Huntsville and Birmingham — a coastal market with its own distinct economy, its own medical infrastructure and a political culture that has rewarded candidates who show up in person between election cycles, not just before them.
Both families have histories in Mobile that the event will draw on. Doug Jones’s legal career and Senate tenure made him a familiar figure in the city’s civic organizations, and the Figures family’s ties to the region run through Rep. Shomari Figures’ work in state and federal government and his family’s long record of public service in south Alabama. Thursday’s conversation is, in part, a homecoming for both.
What remains to be seen is how the concerns raised on the tour translate into the campaigns ahead. Health care and maternal access are issues where state policy — from Medicaid coverage to hospital funding — determines more than any campaign speech, and Alabama’s decisions on those programs have consequences measured in clinics open or closed across the state’s 67 counties.
For Thursday’s audience at the Fuse Factory, the value will be more immediate: two hours with people whose families shape state and national policy, in a room close enough to City Hall that the questions asked will be hard to ignore. The tour moves on after Mobile, but the issues it carries — affordability, health care, maternal care and representation — will stay exactly where they started: in the households of the women the tour came to hear.
The fireside chat with Louise Jones and Kalisha Figures begins at 5:10 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 6, at the Fuse Factory, 200 Government St. in downtown Mobile. The event is open to residents interested in the issues affecting women across Alabama, and organizers have encouraged attendees to bring the questions their neighborhoods want answered.