This was a historic week in my state: Alabama elected a female U.S. Senator for the first time. It’s the kind of step toward equal representation I’d normally cheer. But I’m not celebrating.
It’s not that I didn’t expect the Trump-backed Katie Britt to replace Sen. Richard Shelby, whose chief of staff she had been. And it’s not that I thought she had a stellar opponent in Will Boyd, an engineer and Baptist minister. Like most voters, I knew little about him. Britt apparently declined to debate Boyd, and his small war chest — less than $100,000 compared with her $9 million — limited his ability to get his message out.