To paraphrase Robert Earl Keen, the craziness of Alabama politics goes on forever, the corruption and ineptitude never ends.
That was certainly true for 2025, just as it was for many of the years that came before. There were wild occurrences, unbelievable stories, incomprehensible decisions and a little good.
Here were my top five stories for the year. Not necessarily the top five stories of the year. Just mine. Enjoy.
John Wahl isn’t John Wahl
If I had to put together the strangest, most unbelievable stories that I’ve ever covered in my entire career, I’m not sure this wouldn’t be at the top. It started with a couple of stories from Kyle Whitmire at al.com raising questions about Wahl’s use of a very weird voter ID—one that identified him only as “John Wahl” and appeared to be some sort of state employee ID.
Turns out, it was an ID created by Wahl and a former state auditor. And things only got weirder from there.
I wrote about Wahl and his family’s stranglehold on Limestone County politics and their use of a family-owned consulting company to back preferred Republican candidates—a no-no according to party rules. His fellow Limestone County Republicans accused him of a variety of improper dealings and reported it all to state officials and the Ethics Commission. And still, it got more weird.
A few weeks later, Whitmire reported that Wahl had received a speeding ticket showing that he had a Tennessee drivers license and that his real name is Nehemiah Wahl. APR then found dozens of instances of Wahl using what amounted to an alias—“John Wahl”—to sign all sorts of official paperwork. Perhaps most odd, though, was the fact that while he was fighting with media and state officials over the use of his bogus state ID, which identified him as John Wahl, and claiming religious exemptions to vote without showing ID, Wahl had a valid Tennessee drivers license.
Florida Man enters Alabama Governor’s race
When 2024 ended, we all thought we had a pretty good handle on what the 2026 governor’s race might look like. Lieutenant Governor Will Ainsworth was going to take a shot, and be a clear favorite, and a handful of top state officials and well known names would likely join him. And then, Tommy Tuberville decided working in the U.S. Senate was just too taxing and he wanted a less demanding gig.
Tuberville’s entrance into the field, and his name recognition, scared away the Republican field, including Ainsworth—a move that surprised pretty much everyone. One reason it was such a surprise—aside from Tuberville’s incredibly high unfavorable polling among even Republicans—was that Tuberville doesn’t live in Alabama and owns no property here. Just a few months earlier a Washington Post podcast broke down just how suspect Tuberville’s residency actually was, even in terms of continuing to represent Alabama in the U.S. Senate. APR and other media outlets expanded that reporting with details of Tuberville’s travel records, showing him going back and forth between D.C. and his home in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla., pretty much every time the Senate went into recess.
Tuberville has brushed aside questions about his residency and how he ever plans to prove that he can meet Alabama’s seven-year requirement. But those questions are going to persist and grow over the coming months, as Doug Jones’ campaign ramps up and various ballot challenges are filed.
AG for sale
Alabama’s campaign finance laws have long been a point of contention between candidates and a public that wants as much transparency as possible. While those laws ban certain transactions, such as transfers between political action committees, that are routinely used to mask the identity of donors, the laws have quite purposefully left a gaping hole in the area of 501(c)(4) donations.
And Katherine Robertson walked right through it.
Shortly after announcing her campaign for attorney general, Robertson received a massive $1 million donation from a sketchy, out-of-state c4 that is operated by a former official at the Republican Attorney Generals Association. That group was pretty easily tied to mega-donor Leonard Leo, who has made it a mission to tie himself to as many state AGs as possible. APR reported, citing sources with intimate knowledge, that Robertson was one of Leo’s hand picked AG candidates.
The money has continued to flow to her campaign from the shady dark money sources, all of it completely untraceable. A recent donation of $150,000 came from another c4 entity—this one set up just days prior to the donation with absolutely no publicly available information at all. APR was able to confirm that it, too, was tied loosely to RAGA, but no other specific information was available.
The whole ordeal has again opened up conversations about Alabama’s lack of oversight of these types of nonprofits and their donations to candidates.
A lot of love
It’s rare in Alabama politics to find a feel-good story—a story of someone doing something selfless and with a happy ending. But that was the case for Alabama House Speaker Anthony Daniels, although it didn’t start out that way.
Daniels struggled through much of 2025 with worsening health issues. He was mystified by the trouble. A guy who exercised regularly, ate right and had been in relatively great health most of his life, Daniels was declining rapidly—tired constantly, unable to focus and feeling worse and worse each day. After being convinced by his House colleagues to see a doctor and get tests run, he discovered that his kidneys were failing.
Why? To this day, no one is quite sure. The most commonly suspected culprit is COVID—either the way the virus affected him (Daniels was hospitalized for a time with COVID) or a side effect of the vaccine. Regardless, though, he required immediate treatment, and doctors soon figured out that he would need a kidney transplant, quickly.
He found his donor much faster than usual—she was in the house with him. Daniels’ wife, Dr. Teneshia Daniels, a dentist in Huntsville, was a match. And she wasn’t taking no for an answer. In June, the couple entered the hospital and the transplant was performed. “God definitely put me with my angel,” Daniels said of his wife.
The two of them have recovered well, with some adjustments, and seem to be doing fine.
Legislative failures
After a whole bunch of years covering the Alabama Legislature, I am used to it doing terrible things. I am used to embarrassments and awfulness. I am never surprised by corruption or incompetence. But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a single session in which the Legislature seemed to go more out of its way to do very unpopular things than 2025.
There was failing again on gambling. There was repealing a very popular tax break on overtime pay. And there was a weird bill that shut down hemp sales and hemp stores, removing life-changing pain medication that was serving thousands of Alabamians.
Add all three together and it was a monumentally unpopular session for lawmakers, because all three of those things were particularly unpopular among Republican voters.
Gambling is no longer a liberal wish list item. Poll after poll shows that GOP voters now want an opportunity to approve gambling legislation and stop the flow of tax dollars into other states. That our politicians continue to fail on this front is wearing very thin very quickly.
Of all the things that the Legislature has done over the past few years, one of the most universally popular was repealing the tax on overtime pay. It essentially gave a 5 percent break to some of the state’s hardest workers. Who doesn’t like that? Well, ALGOP lawmakers, searching for sources of revenue in order to give out a huge tax break to rich people who are sending their kids to private schools, decided it was just too costly. They repealed it. And created the largest tax increase on working Alabamians in decades.
Finally, absolutely no one, aside from alcoholic beverage companies, was clamoring to stop hemp sales. The products posed no real danger to minors or anyone else. They were being used to get pain relief by people legitimately suffering. And they had grown into a legitimate, multi-million-dollar business in the state, with thousands of stores selling the products.
It all came crashing down, out of the blue, with a hastily put together piece of legislation and a bunch of lies. Lobbyists and advocates barely had time to react before the bill was shoved through. The result was the loss of thousands of businesses and millions in tax revenue.
Add all of it together and those moves also promise to be quite a problem for Republicans at the ballot box in 2026.
