Since state Representative Phillip Ensler, D-Montgomery, announced his campaign for lieutenant governor earlier this month, he has repeatedly emphasized his desire to focus on “real problems, not culture wars and personal agendas.”
During an interview with APR on Tuesday, Ensler explained what real problems he believes Alabama needs to confront and talked about how his time in the state legislature would affect his decisions as lieutenant governor.
“Healthcare is a huge one,” he began. “The fact that we have not expanded Medicaid and are dealing with hospital closures is literally a matter of life or death. Another is public education. You know, yes, the state has done some things that have been helpful as far as the Literacy Act, the Numeracy Act, but we really need to do even more to support our public schools and public school educators.”
“A lot of them, particularly teachers, we pay lip service to how great they are, but we also need to back that with better pay and good health insurance and retirement,” Ensler continued. “When they’re doing better, they do a better job for our children.”
The representative then singled out the need to expand access to mental health services and the number of Alabamians struggling to pay their bills as key concerns.
“Those things—healthcare, mental health, education, and financial and economic issues—are the things that really matter,” he stated. “Doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican or independent.”
Ensler has also portrayed his candidacy as an opportunity for voters dissatisfied with the status quo, which he described on Tuesday as “focusing all on what I would call our distractions and wedge issues.”
As examples of these distractions, he pointed to “everything from book bans to anti DEI” and bills “changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.”
When Ensler spoke about his own work in the state legislature, he focused primarily on a bill banning “Glock switches” which was signed by Governor Kay Ivey earlier this year.
In order to pass that bill, Ensler recounted, he “had to bring together a coalition of families that have been affected by gun violence, bring together law enforcement from city, county, state, federal levels to all rally behind that.”
“And it shows that when we do work together, when you do focus on things that are gonna help improve people’s lives, that you can make a difference,” he said. “You know, there were some people who looked at me and thought I was crazy as a freshman Democrat introducing this type of public safety bill.”
Ensler also spoke about how he had needed to work with Republican legislators like Senator Will Barfoot, R-Pike Road, to get anything passed. “The legislature, the make-up is super Republican,” he stated. “And in order to get anything done, I have to work with them and find that common ground.”
This spirit of negotiation and bipartisanship would carry over into Ensler’s work as lieutenant governor, he explained.
During an interview with the Alabama Reflector, and again during his conversation with APR, Ensler said that while the office of lieutenant governor is limited in Alabama compared to other states, he would use the office as a “ bully pulpit” in order to influence politics within the state.
Asked by APR for an example of how he might use the lieutenant governorship in this way, Ensler offered up gambling. Members of the state legislature have repeatedly tried to legalize sports betting and create a state lottery in recent years, but each attempt has failed to pass the Senate before the legislative session ends.
“ I hear from people all over the state—Democrat, Republican, white, black, poor, more affluent—that say it’s crazy that we don’t have a state lottery,” Ensler told APR. “People cross over state lines to buy lotto tickets, and we’re missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used for education or could be used for healthcare.”
Using the bully pulpit in this case would mean, Ensler explained, “ not just [publicly calling] for it, because anybody can, you know, publicly do something, but to really spend that time to convene meetings, to try to bring people together, to reach a consensus.”
He clarified that he wouldn’t be trying to use the office to force people to support gambling legalization or “bully them into it in a bad way, but in a positive way of saying, ‘Hey, let’s put our heads together and figure this out.’”
At the close of the Tuesday interview, Ensler declined to comment on the slate of Republican candidates for lieutenant governor, saying instead that he will be “not running against anyone” but instead “running for a better state for everyone.”
“I’ve spent my entire adult life serving the state and would be honored to continue to do it as lieutenant governor,” he stated.
