Tuesday's election may have been a blue tsunami nationally, but it was perhaps more of a blue trickle in Alabama. Republican U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville beat Democrat Doug Jones to capture the governor's office. Republicans maintained control of all statewide offices. One bright spot for Democrats is U. S. Rep. Shomari Figures. He held on for reelection in Alabama's Second Congressional District, which had been redrawn by Republicans to be more favorable to the GOP.
For perspective on Tuesday's results, WBHM's Andrew Yeager spoke with Auburn University political science professor Mitchell Brown.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Big picture, what jumped out to you about the election results in Alabama?
Big picture, the election results in Alabama track exactly as I would have expected. Alabama was not interested in following the rest of the country in terms of their rejection of Trump policies and critique of the Trump administration. We saw Alabama stay the course with Alabama politics.
I will say the big surprise in Alabama for me was the reelection of Figures. And really what that was is, I think, the incumbency advantage still holds in Alabama. It might not in other places, but it still holds here.
If you're a Republican, you failed to pick up that congressional seat. You lost a few state house races, but your guy took the governor's office. You won a lot of other contests. What does Tuesday tell you about how Republicans sit?
In Alabama, what we saw was a shift left in almost all of the counties across the state slightly, but not enough to change the results of many trends that we've seen in the counties across the state. In fact, I think that the closest statewide election we saw it was for governor. And I think what we saw was a little bit of frustration with Trump, but a stay-the-course state.
For Democrats they were hoping to ride that wave behind Doug Jones. That largely didn't happen. How do you see Democrats in Alabama positioned in light of Tuesday's results?
They've certainly done better on Tuesday than they have in recent elections. And if they can capitalize that moving forward, I think it's possible with the right candidates that they could pick up some more seats. And as we saw with a gubernatorial race, Tuberville won. But Tuberville did not win by a wide margin. He won by the narrowest margin we saw in state politics and by so much less than Kay Ivey did in 2022. And with the right candidate or with the wrong candidate on the Republican side — targeting where to put people and who to run I think will really matter for the Democratic Party.
Taking a step back, do the results say anything about Alabama voters? What can we read into that?
I think what we saw was that Alabama voters like Alabama politics and are not trending with the rest of the country. And that the Republicans in Alabama can really capitalize on that as they move forward to ensure that the seats that they have here nationally, as well as the control that they have in the state, will continue moving forward.
