commentary
The former senator announced his candidacy for governor — against Tommy Tuberville
Published
December 16, 2025 6:45AM (EST)
Former Sen. Doug Jone speaks at the 60th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing on Sept. 15, 2023. (Butch Dill – Pool/Getty Images)
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.”
Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter,