Tommy Tuberville, the senior U.S. senator of Alabama, has teased the possibility of running for governor of Alabama.
During an interview with Alabama Daily News, Tuberville said he “hasn’t made up his mind yet” on leaving Congress, but that “the governor’s office does interest him.”
Tuberville, a former football coach at Auburn University and Republican, has been a United States senator since 2020, when he defeated the Democratic incumbent Doug Jones. His current term will end in 2027.
Prior to the election, Tuberville was endorsed by Trump and the National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s oldest and largest pro-life organization.
During his tenure as a senator, he introduced the Financial Freedom Act of 2022, a bill that “prohibits the Department of Labor from limiting the type or range of investments that fiduciaries may offer participants and beneficiaries in certain employer-sponsored retirement plans.”
The current governor of Alabama, Kay Ivey, has served in the role since 2017 after replacing former Gov. Robert Bentley, who resigned after a sex scandal. Ivey has been elected as governor twice since then and is thus ineligible to stand for re-election in 2026 because Alabama has a two consecutive term limit for governors. Ivey would be eligible to run again in 2030.
Tuberville has attracted controversy during his first term in office. He blocked the nominations for promotion of over 400 military officers due to the Department of Defense’s policy on reimbursing soldiers who had to seek abortions out-of-state after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Both Democrats and Republicans criticized Tuberville for the blockade, which he only lifted in December of 2023 after a coalition of Republican congressmen met with him behind closed doors.
Ragan Hope Wilson, a senior majoring in social work, said she is not in favor of Tuberville running for governor, saying his time in the senate has only been “performative politics” and that she would rather him stay in the Senate.
“We deserve a governor who has the economic development, the welfare and the success of Alabamians,” she said. “I’d rather him 100% stay as a senator. I think that if he was elected governor, he’d learn that a governor has to govern. And I don’t think that his time as a senator has proven that he enjoys doing much of that at all.”
He has also been criticized by opponents such as former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his primary challenger in the 2020 election, for being a “carpetbagger,” with a report published in 2023 noting his primary residence was in Florida’s Santa Rosa beach and not the Auburn house that he claims.
Notably, while Alabama requires that anyone elected to the U.S. Senate be a resident of the state for a minimum of one day, to be eligible for governor, the candidate must have lived in the state for a minimum of seven years.
Tuberville is cognizant of this fact, and even decided against running for governor in 2017 according to an interview with Sirius XM, saying, “I think I could’ve gone through legal channels to get the residency issue solved, but my family wasn’t wild about the idea either.”
Now Tuberville can claim that he has fulfilled the seven-year residency requirement due to his ownership of the Auburn property since 2017, leading to the increasing levels of speculation that built to his announcement.
