Will Doug Jones pull off another Alabama miracle in 2026?

Come November 2026, Alabama voters could see two familiar names on the ballot for governor. On Dec. 13, former Democratic Sen. Doug Jones announced his candidacy, joining current GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who defeated him in his 2020 reelection bid by 20 points. (Both candidates have primary elections in May.)

With President Donald Trump and the GOP’s declining poll numbers, the stage appears to have been set for Democratic wins in the 2026 midterms — and possibly including surprise victories like the one that took Jones to the Senate in 2017 and foreshadowed a big blue wave the following year. 

The 2017 Alabama Senate special election pitted Jones against Republican nominee Judge Roy Moore to fill the seat of GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions, who had been tapped as Donald Trump’s attorney general. 

But that race foreshadowed more than Democrats’ victory in the 2018 midterms. It was a referendum on what we now know to be common behavior among many of our political and business elites: the creepy habit of powerful older men targeting underage girls for sex. It’s not that such a thing was unheard of before, but with #MeToo and, more recently, revelations from the Epstein files — that show no signs of stopping — we now know it has been a much more pervasive activity among the nation’s elite than previously understood. 

In 2017 it was quite a revelation that Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court whose claim to fame was an insistence on displaying the Ten Commandments in (and outside) public buildings, allegedly had a long history of coercing girls and young women into tawdry sexual situations. Although he had been under clouds of corruption for some years and was highly controversial, this came as a shock to the Alabama electorate — and it opened the door for Jones to be the first Democrat elected statewide in nearly two decades.

Best known as the man who prosecuted Ku Klux Klan members responsible for one of the most notorious events in the Civil Rights Movement — the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four Black girls on Sept. 15, 1963 — Jones had an excellent reputation in the state as a former U.S. attorney. Unfortunately, because the special election was only to serve out the remainder of Sessions’ term, Jones had to run again in 2020 and was beaten by former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, a man who said during his campaign that the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate and the executive.”

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Since then, Tuberville has been a train wreck in the Senate. He has continued to display an astonishing ignorance about civic life, such as when he suggested postponing Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, apparently unaware that the Constitution sets the date as Jan. 20. But Tuberville has also become infamous for a series of racist gaffes, which have been beyond the pale even for MAGA politicians. In October 2022, he compared the descendants of enslaved people to criminals. The following year, he claimed that white nationals are unfairly labeled as racist. (He later attempted to walk back his comments.) At a Trump rally in 2024, he said that Democrats “want crime because they want to take over what you got. They want to control what you have. They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that.” 

Tuberville’s rhetoric on immigration is as bad as Trump’s. During a June interview in which he was discussing immigration and sanctuary cities, he lambasted “these inner-city rats [that] live off the federal government…it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home.”

Republicans are confident that Tuberville will win the governorship — even though he apparently doesn’t live in Alabama — and don’t see Jones as any real competition. Jones, however, clearly believes that conditions have changed dramatically since 2020 and that Tuberville now has a record he will have to defend — unlike five years ago, when he was just a good-old boy-football coach. That record includes acting as Donald Trump’s rubber stamp and embarrassing the state with his ignorance. 

It’s untelling if that will be a deal breaker; Republicans outnumber Democrats in voter registration by 19%, and a majority of Alabama voters could agree with Tuberville. But 2025 has seen upsets in unexpected places. Mississippi Democrats broke a Republican supermajority in the state Senate in November by flipping two seats. On Dec. 9 in Georgia, a Democrat won a deep red seat in the state House. For the first time in three decades, Miami’s mayor will be a Democrat. On the other hand, despite the party’s hopes, Democrats lost the chance for a pickup in a widely watched race in Tennessee’s seventh congressional district.

Based on Alabama’s electoral map, a Jones victory in November seems impossible. No Democrat has held the governorship since 1998. Then again, back in 2017 most people thought there was no way Roy Moore could be beaten — and Doug Jones surprised them. Maybe it will happen again.

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