On Tuesday, November 3, Alabama Republicans won every statewide office on the ballot. They kept their supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature. Every Republican on this site who was running here won.

That isn't the whole story, though. The governor's race was the closest in 24 years. Democrats flipped four seats in the Legislature, three of them in the Huntsville area. Ballots cast for Democratic candidates went up in all 67 counties, according to the Alabama Reflector. And the one congressional seat Republicans changed the rules to take, they didn't take.

Here's the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good: the seat they redrew stayed blue

This spring, Alabama Republicans brought back a congressional map that federal judges had found to be intentionally discriminatory against Black voters. It was supposed to take Alabama's 2nd District away from Democrat Shomari Figures. (More on how that happened below.)

It didn't work. Figures beat Republican state Rep. Rhett Marques 124,422 to 107,049, or 53.8% to 46.2%, with 99% of the vote counted as of November 14, according to NBC News. Marques conceded on election night.

That was the biggest thing Republicans lost on Tuesday. Here's what else they lost:

• The governor's race got close. Tommy Tuberville beat Democrat Doug Jones by about 4 points. That was the narrowest margin in an Alabama governor's race since 2002, according to state election records reported by FOX10. Every governor's race from 2006 to 2022 was decided by at least 15 points. Jones won 19 counties, the most for a Democrat running for governor since 2010.
• Huntsville elected Alabama's first openly transgender lawmaker. In House District 25, Democrat Allison Montgomery beat Republican Rep. Phillip Rigsby 12,456 to 10,929 as of Wednesday morning. She'll be the first openly transgender member of the Legislature. Rigsby and Republican leaders attacked her for being transgender in the weeks before the election, and Rigsby outraised her 21 to 1.
• A sitting senator lost by 577 votes. In Senate District 7, also in the Huntsville area, Democrat Jared Sluss beat Republican Sen. Sam Givhan 30,255 to 29,678 in unofficial returns. Givhan spent nearly $978,000. Sluss spent about $45,500. At 29, Sluss will be the youngest member of the state Senate.
• An open Senate seat flipped. In Senate District 2, Democrat Rudolph Valentino Drake beat Republican John Roberts 55.9% to 43.8%. Roberts raised more than $843,000. Drake raised about $4,400.
• A House seat outside Birmingham flipped. In House District 15, in Shelby and Jefferson counties, Democrat Nell Brown beat Republican Rep. Leigh Hulsey 11,042 to 10,516. Hulsey raised about $206,000 to Brown's $11,000.

A fifth Republican incumbent may be on the way out, too. In Senate District 10, in northeast Alabama, Republican Sen. Andrew Jones trailed Jesse Battles, a conservative independent, by 52 votes on Wednesday afternoon. Battles was kept off the Republican primary ballot before he ran as an independent. He took the oath of office on November 10, but the margin is small enough under state law to trigger an automatic recount, and Jones hasn't waived it.

All four of those Democrats were outspent, most of them by a lot. Most of them ran on the same things: the cost of living, health care and public schools.

The bad: they won, by less

Tommy Tuberville will be Alabama's next governor. He got 873,332 votes, or 52%, to Doug Jones's 806,270, or 48%, with 98.9% counted as of November 14, according to NBC News. Four years ago, Kay Ivey won the same job with 66.9%. And when Tuberville beat this same Doug Jones for the Senate in 2020, he won 60.1% to 39.7%.

Jones campaigned on public schools, health care costs and guardrails on data centers. Tuberville had told the state's sheriffs in July that the Alabama towns pushing back on data centers were listening to "nonsense" from China, and called their worries "bull crap." Jones conceded on Wednesday.

Barry Moore won the Senate seat Tuberville is leaving. He beat Democrat Everett Wess 917,338 to 759,321, or 54.7% to 45.3%, with 99% counted as of November 14, according to NBC News. Tuberville won that seat with 60.1% six years ago. Moore once stood trial on four felony counts over what he told a grand jury and state investigators about a threat he carried from Alabama's House Speaker. A jury acquitted him. The Speaker went to prison.

The four House Republicans on this site all won, according to the Alabama Reflector and NBC's count:

• Dale Strong won a third term in the Huntsville-based 5th District with 53.2% to Democrat Andrew Sneed's 46.8%, a margin of about 17,000 votes. In 2024, he had no Democrat running against him. Sneed ran on the cost of living and a pause on new data centers. When DOGE came for federal jobs, Strong told Huntsville "we may lose a couple." Then 279 senior employees at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center were listed to leave.
• Gary Palmer won a seventh term in the 6th District, around Birmingham, with 57.5% to Democrat Maurice Mercer's 42.5%. Two years ago he won with 70.3%. Palmer once promised he'd serve only five terms. "His last two challengers received 29% and 15% of the vote," Mercer wrote after the election. "Last night we secured just above 42%."
• Mike Rogers won a 13th term in the 3rd District, in east Alabama, with 64% to Democrat Lee McInnis's 36%. He had no Democratic opponent in 2024. Rogers was one of only 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth a federal holiday.
• Robert Aderholt won a 16th term in the 4th District, in north Alabama, with 74.9% to Democrat Amanda Pusczek's 25.1%. Pusczek ran on helping Alabama's rural hospitals. Aderholt chairs the House panel that writes the budget for health care, schools and job training, and his bill this year eliminates adult and youth job training and cuts the main federal aid for low-income schools by $1.9 billion.

The ugly: the map they weren't allowed to use

Republicans in Alabama have spent five years trying not to draw a second congressional district where Black voters can elect the candidate they want. This year they finally got permission. They still lost the seat.

How the map was drawn

About 27% of Alabamians are Black. After the 2020 census, the Legislature drew a map with only one majority-Black district out of seven. In January 2022, a panel of three federal judges ruled that the map violated the Voting Rights Act. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in June 2023.

The next month, the Legislature passed a new map. It still had only one majority-Black district. The judges threw that one out too, and the Supreme Court let that ruling stand. A court-appointed expert then drew the map Alabama used in 2024. That year, for the first time in the state's history, Alabama voters elected two Black members of Congress in the same election: Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures.

The judges later found more than a legal violation. They found that the state had intentionally discriminated against Black voters. Figures pointed out that two of the three judges on that panel were appointed by Donald Trump.

What changed this year

In April, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais. It made it much harder to challenge a map under the Voting Rights Act. Alabama's attorney general, Steve Marshall, asked the Court the next day to let Alabama use the 2023 map.

Republican leaders said plainly what it was for. House Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter and Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger said the state had "a responsibility to give our state a fighting chance to send seven Republican members to Congress." Doug Jones, then running for governor, called it a "power grab."

The 2023 map would cut the Black voting-age population of the 2nd District from about 49% to just under 40%, by moving it into the Republican-leaning Wiregrass. It also put Figures' home in Mobile into a different district. The Alabama Reflector reported that the Legislature moved to redraw at President Trump's urging.

Then it went fast:

• May 11: The Supreme Court threw out the order blocking the 2023 map and sent the case back to the three judges.
• May 12: Ivey called new primaries in the 1st, 2nd, 6th and 7th districts for August 11, with no runoff. People in those districts had been voting by absentee ballot since March. Their votes in those congressional races were thrown out.
• May 26: The three judges looked at the case again, under the new rule, and blocked the map again. "We again cannot understand the 2023 Plan as anything other than intentionally discriminatory," they wrote, unanimously.
• June 2: The Supreme Court froze that ruling, 6 to 3, and let Alabama use the map this November. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in dissent, warned of a "chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians."

So Alabama held its 2026 election on a map that the three judges, applying the Supreme Court's new rule, had found was drawn on purpose to discriminate against Black voters.

What the map was worth on Tuesday

Marques ran as Trump's endorsed candidate in a district built for a Republican. He had money behind him, too: political action committees gave him nearly $4.9 million, compared with more than $1.9 million for Figures, according to the Reflector.

Figures won by 17,373 votes. The Reflector reported that anger over Callais and the redistricting that followed it drove Black turnout around the South.

"We had the deck stacked against us," Figures told supporters on election night. "I stood in a Senate committee hearing room that bears my father's name, and I pleaded with the state legislature to not do what they ultimately did."

Next door, Mississippi Republicans are making plans to get rid of Bennie Thompson's majority-Black district after the same ruling.

The rest of the ugly

A few more results from Tuesday:

• A fake Pride rally. Four days before the election, Alabama voters got texts inviting them to a "Vote with Pride" rally with Doug Jones that didn't exist. The opt-out reply named SECPAC, a super PAC set up by a nonprofit founded by Tuberville's fundraiser, his campaign manager's wife and a major donor.
• Anti-trans attacks on two Democrats. Republican leaders went after Allison Montgomery and Terri Osborne, a Democratic state House candidate in south Alabama, for being transgender. Montgomery won anyway.
• A constitutional amendment for something schools already do. Voters passed Amendment 3 with 62.6% of the vote. It makes school boards adopt policies on the Pledge of Allegiance and student-led prayer. State law already requires a voluntary daily pledge in public schools and already allows student-led prayer.

What the results show

Alabama Republicans brought back a congressional map that federal judges found was intentionally drawn to weaken Black votes, threw out absentee ballots to rerun four primaries on it, and still lost the 2nd District: Shomari Figures won by 17,373 votes. Tommy Tuberville won the governor's race with 52%, down from Kay Ivey's 66.9% four years ago, the narrowest margin since 2002. Barry Moore won the Senate seat with 54.7%, down from Tuberville's 60.1% in 2020. And Democrats flipped four legislative seats, all four while being outspent.

Source

Alabama Democrats flip four legislative seats in 2026 midterms — Anna Barrett, Alabama Reflector, November 4, 2026.