During an interview with APR on Friday, Lee McInnis, the only Democratic candidate who has already filed to run to represent Alabama’s 3rd Congressional District next year, explained what led him to throw his hat in the ring.
A veteran whose campaign website stresses his extensive “career in the Defense Intelligence Community,” McInnis said his time organizing with Indivisible Auburn Opelika earlier this year is what led him to run for public office.
“I began seriously considering a run for Congress in April,” he said. “As part of the Indivisible town hall meeting we had here, I began to question the way [the 3rd District’s current Representative] Mike Rogers was engaging and interacting with his constituents here in the 3rd district.”
“ We had invited Mike Rogers to come attend that town hall a month in advance,” McInnis stressed. “We had checked his schedule. His schedule showed him being on district time so he was in the district. So he could have been there. They made no response. We sent a certified letter inviting him.”
“Literally the afternoon before, his staff put out—I assume it was his staff—put out a statement that was just about how we had invited him and the process under which we had invited him, and it just, it wasn’t correct,” he added.
McInnis additionally recounted how, at that town hall, when he asked the attendees who had reached out to Congressman Rogers, many of the attendees signaled they had. When he asked who’d heard back, almost everyone lowered their hand.
Throughout the interview on Friday, McInnis repeatedly returned to his belief that Congressman Rogers has failed to adequately represent the district. While describing conversations he has had with District 3 residents, he related their concerns to a lack of responsiveness on Rogers’ part, in Congress and in the district.
Discussing the recent temporary disruption of SNAP benefits due to the federal shutdown, McInnis said that while Democratic Congresswoman Terri Sewell and fellow Democratic Congressional candidate Clyde Jones had organized food drives, Rogers “never even made a statement on it, never cared, never showed any sort of empathy or concern for one in seven people in his district who suddenly were hungry.”
McInnis also criticized Rogers for the Republican Congressman’s support of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the federal budget passed earlier this year that significantly cut federal funding for SNAP and healthcare programs.
One voter told McInnis, he remembered, that “Randolph County has been sitting on the edge of a precipice for decades, and if they’ve passed [the OBBBA], we will go over the edge and there’s nothing that will stop it.”
“The fact that Mike Rogers five days later voted for that bill, and then it went to the Senate and they made it even worse, and it came back to the House and he voted for it—just that lack of contact with what’s really going on in his district and his lack of empathy for what the people in his district are going through was all sort of summed up in that one line of that one conversation,” McInnis complained.
While McInnis told APR that he requires all of his volunteers and staff to understand that he is genuinely trying to be elected next year, Alabama’s 3rd Congressional district is deeply Republican. In 2024, Rogers ran unopposed for reelection, but in 2022, the last year he had a Democratic opponent, Rogers still won by almost fifty points.
“I’ve been spending the last five or six months doing nothing but going around and talking to people,” McInnis stated. “The largest thing I get was, ‘I don’t know who Mike Rogers is, and I don’t know how he knows who I am.’”
“So, I think that just being out there and making contact with people and letting them know that somebody wants to go to Washington, D.C. and represent them gives them some hope and some comfort that there is the potential for change,” he said.
