Since Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville announced on Tuesday he would be running for governor, instead of reelection to the Senate, he’s repeatedly sought to explain his decision. So far, his explanation is typically that America is in crisis, Trump is working tirelessly to fix it from Washington, D.C., and Tuberville needs to help carry out Trump’s policy agenda in Alabama.
In an opinion piece explaining his decision to run for governor published by 1819 News, Tuberville wrote he will be the “CEO” of Alabama and promised to help fulfill Trump’s policy goals in the state.
He also specifically highlighted the policy areas of job creation, immigration, school choice and conservative social values. However, the senator did not clarify why he believes he could outperform current Alabama leadership, which has passed significant bills regarding all four of those areas in recent years.
During a Wednesday morning interview on Fox Sports talk show “On The Mark,” Tuberville repeatedly said America is in crisis, joking at one point that while “our country is in bad shape, our college athletics is worse.”
“Our country is on a breaking point right now, along with our state,” Tuberville told the show’s host. “There’s a lot of things we’ve got to get done nationally in the next year and a half that I’ll be with President Trump in Washington D.C., and then hopefully be in Montgomery after that.”
Questioned about how he could manage running for governor while representing Alabama in Washington, Tuberville said “my number one job is United States Senate.”
Later, when asked if he ever gets tired, Tuberville responded by saying he “just keeps going” and has “pretty good health.”
“I contemplated this governor run over the U.S. Senate run,” Tuberville stated. “The U.S. Senate is a tough position. It’s hard. But it’s very fulfilling and you know you can get something done.”
However, “it was just time to come home and run for governor and put my expertise back in the state because I think President Trump is going to get everything in line in the federal government,” he explained.
The senator also made remarkable and apparently unsubstantiated claims about the Trump White House’s successes thus far to illustrate his arguments.
“We’re looking at a 4 percent growth rate, which is unbelievable, just after a four, five month period of President Trump,” Tuberville claimed at one point.
It’s presently unclear where Tuberville may have come across this estimate. The Bureau of Economic Analysis found that gross domestic product fell by 0.2 percent during the first quarter of 2025. Moreover, the GDPNow forecast produced by the Atlanta Federal Reserve estimates that the annual rate of real GDP growth in the second quarter of 2025 will be 2.2 percent.
Even when Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro challenged the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of 1.7 percent annual GDP growth in an opinion piece for the D.C.-focused publication The Hill, he wrote that “2.2 percent to 2.7 percent” would be a more realistic ballpark.
During another radio interview, Tuberville said he had “talked a lot with President Trump” about running for governor.
“We’ll have a great staff in Montgomery,” he boasted. “We’re going to do things a lot different, and we’ve got to use every dime that we make to help the American people, the Alabama people, more prosperous.”
“There’s so many things we have to do but at the end of the day, it all starts with President Trump and getting things done in Washington, D.C., for the next eighteen months,” Tuberville said.
Asked what he would do first if elected governor, the senator said his team is planning to start looking at the state budget once the One Big Beautiful Bill is through the Senate. He also mentioned that “we have over a thousand bridges that are condemned.” The most recent data from the Federal Highway Administration shows only 543 bridges are in “poor” condition in Alabama.
Tuberville then said he plans to support income tax cuts, claiming cuts could incentivize spending and result in more tax revenue. But empirical evidence from past state and federal tax rate changes has largely shown this is not true at current rates. No economists who responded to one survey conducted by the Kent Clark Center for Global Markets agreed a tax cut would increase total tax revenue, despite many agreeing it would increase GDP growth.
“We’ll have a great game plan a year and a half from now,” Tuberville stated. “We’ll start from ground zero, but we’ll hit the ground running.”
