For 19-year-old campaign manager, it's not just politics, it's personal

Logan Church is 19 years old and when you listen to her tell her story, sometimes it sounds like different radio stations that bleed into each other on the same spot on the dial.

There's Logan the campaign manager, who talks about the value of door-to-door canvassing and the challenges of fundraising.

There's Logan the young woman, who enjoys going to dances, frets about college and obsesses over makeup.

There's Logan the survivor, who cracks jokes about learning to walk again after brain surgery.

And all of that is before we get to what brought her back to the northwest Alabama, where she was born.

With a story this complicated, it's best to start at the beginning.

When Logan was born at Helen Keller Hospital in Muscle Shoals, a piece of placenta remained behind in her mother's womb -- a fatal complication that could have been detected with a $5 test.

The day Rose Church died, Logan's father, Gene Church wrote a bill to mandate that test, in addition to requiring insurers to cover a minimum of 48 hours of hospitalization after a birth.

Pushing Logan in a stroller around the Alabama State House, he successfully lobbied lawmakers to support what became known as "Rose's Law," which passed unanimously.

The Church family moved to Florida. Gene remarried, and Logan grew up among nine siblings. Home-schooled, she started taking college classes when she was just 16 -- about the time her aunt, who still lived in northwest Alabama, sent her an urgent message through Facebook.

"She had attached a Facebook article about this law being repealed," Logan recalls.

Her aunt told her to show the article to her dad. The next day, the father and daughter rode together to Montgomery, to deal with a senator Gene knew well and Logan not at all.

"My dad never told me about Larry Stutts growing up because, I think, for him forgiving and moving on was a big deal," Logan says.

When Larry Stutts won election in 2014, he had the benefit of being a Republican in a conservative state running against a Democratic lighting rod. He won, in large part, because he wasn't Roger Bedford, the incumbent.

But in office, Stutts began to make a name for himself. Not a good one. But a name.

In his first year, Stutts proposed a bill to repeal Rose's Law.

At the time, Stutts called Rose's Law "emotional legislation that doesn't improve care" and denied that his bill was motivated by any sort of personal vendetta.

But there was something else that Stutts wasn't telling anyone, including his own cosponsors, and it was something Gene Church had never told his daughter, either.

When they got in the car to drive to Montgomery, he turned to his daughter and told her there was something she didn't know.

"He said, 'Larry Stutts, this senator, was the same doctor who was your mom's OB-GYN," Logan recalls.

Once this important fact became public knowledge, Stutts's bill died quickly, and lawmakers in Montgomery -- not especially known for their scruples -- largely shunned the freshman lawmaker.

As for Logan, she says she was bit by the political bug.

First she served as an intern on Sen. Marco Rubio's presidential campaign, and then Rubio's reelection campaign for the U.S. Senate.

The day after senior prom, she packed her bags for Virginia, where she had been hired by a Republican candidate for the House of Delegates, Bob Thomas, who won despite the "blue wave' of Democratic victories there last year -- by 73 votes.

Then, when visiting her siblings at college and going to a dance with one of her brother's friends, her hands began to go numb. Then her arms. Then her neck. After a long series of tests, she says she learned she had a chiari malformation.

"That means my brain was literally falling out of my skull and crushing my spine," she says.

Doctors told her she had to have surgery immediately. When she woke up, she realized her motor skills had been impaired. Things like walking and brushing her teeth she had to relearn.

"This is the first time I've worn heels," she says walking down a sidewalk in downtown Florence.

She just had one more thing she wanted to do, Logan says -- to work on a campaign in northwest Alabama, for someone running against Larry Stutts.

Logan says she met with all the candidates running against Stutts in the Republican primary, but she settled on Eric Aycock because she found him to be a good listener who didn't pretend to know everything.

Aycock says he was struck by how savvy Logan was on the campaign. When knocking on doors, people sometimes mistake her for his daughter.

"She's young but she has a veteran's kind of attitude and nothing surprises her," he says "That's comforting because I've never ran before. It's all new to me."

Logan insists she isn't out for revenge, although who could hold it against her if she were?

"I like to say I don't have a vendetta against Larry Stutts," she says. "I have a vendetta against people who use political office for personal gain."

Trying to repeal Rose's Law was petty and personal, she says.

The campaign has been challenging, she says, because political donors have been reluctant to bet against an incumbent, even one with Stutts' disadvantages.

And when it's over? Logan says she looks forward to going to college, taking classes, acting like a typical 19-year-old.

"My entire life I've not had the opportunity to be my age," she says.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

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