On August 12, 1941, the House of Representatives voted on whether to keep the Army together. The draft was about to expire. If the extension failed, most of the enlisted men and three quarters of the officers would go home that fall. The bill passed 203 to 202. One vote. Four months later, Japan hit Pearl Harbor, and the United States had an Army because one congressman did not stay home.
My father, Lawrence Kadish, has written about that vote. He has spent his life studying what happens to nations that get comfortable, and he keeps coming back to the same lesson. History does not belong to the people with the best argument. It belongs to the people who show up.
Alabama learned that the hard way, and not that long ago.
In December 2017, this state sent a Democrat to the United States Senate for the first time in twenty-five years. The margin was about 22,000 votes. Roughly 1.35 million Alabamians voted. Nearly two million registered voters did not. Alabama did not change its mind that year. Alabama stayed home.
That is the whole column, if you want the short version. Everything that follows is why it matters more now than it did then.
I develop property for a living. Before I put a dollar into a piece of ground, I spend months reading. Zoning maps. Traffic counts. Crime reports. Tax rates. Who sits on the city council and what they have actually voted for. What I never do is buy because the seller is charming. Charm does not pour concrete. Charm does not keep a parking lot safe at night. The record does.
I have spent more than thirty years doing this from Florida to Virginia. I could build almost anywhere. I chose Alabama, and I keep choosing it, because this state votes its values. Public safety is the baseline here, not a debate. Business is welcome here. Work is respected, faith is not hidden, and family still means something. Look at the people Alabama sends to Montgomery and Washington. You can argue about any one of them. As a group, they got there by standing for the same things their neighbors stand for.
None of that is guaranteed. Here is what I see from the closing table.
The moving trucks point south, and a lot of them stop here. People are leaving states that voted for charisma and got the bill. Police budgets cut. Taxes that chased employers across the state line. Downtowns that empty out after dark. They come to Alabama because it works. I am glad to have them as neighbors, and I have been glad to build for them.
But some of them bring their voting habits with them. Look next door. Georgia had not voted for a Democrat for president since 1992. In 2020 it did, by 11,779 votes. Two months later it sent two Democrats to the United States Senate. That did not happen because Georgia changed its mind. The Atlanta suburbs filled up, and a lot of the people who had always carried that state assumed it would carry itself.
Then look at what happened next. In 2024, Georgia came back by about 115,000 votes, because the people who had stayed home showed up.
Alabama is not Georgia. But Atlanta is two hours down I-20, and the math is the math. If conservatives show up on November 3, Alabama will be fine. If they stay home and assume somebody else has it covered, 2017 will not be the last time this state wakes up surprised.
So here is my case.
Do not vote for the most likeable candidate. Do not vote for the most famous one. Do not stay home because you cannot stand one of them. Vote for the people who stand for what you stand for, and check the record to make sure they do. My father says a campaign speech is written for the crowd, and the only way to know what you are buying is to read the label: the record, the affiliations, and who the candidate answers to. He is right. Treat the ballot like a contract. Read it before you sign it.
This is not a hit piece on anybody, and it is not a hit piece on the people moving here. You can disagree with your neighbor’s vote and still help him carry a couch. In Alabama we do that every day. We spend the whole fall split down the middle over Auburn and Alabama, and nobody moves away over it.
Election Day is the one day a year the whole state shows up at the same time for the same purpose. Not for a personality. For the kind of place we want to live in, raise our kids in, and build in.
One congressman decided whether America had an Army. Twelve thousand Georgians flipped a state. Twenty-two thousand Alabamians decided who sat in the Senate. On November 3, show up. Then go to work Wednesday morning, next to the neighbor who voted the other way, and build something together.
William Kadish is the President and CEO of Broad Metro LLC, an Alabama-based company. With over 30 years of projects across the United States, his work spans mixed-use development, commercial development and long-term community partnerships from Florida to Virginia. He is also co-founder of The Parlay Project, a nonprofit focused on sports gambling addiction awareness and recovery, and serves on the Board of the YMCA of Alabama.
