Alabama U.S. House candidate Candice Duvieilh says her campaign is looking to bring greater accountability and expertise to the state’s 5th Congressional District.
Duvieilh, a Democrat contender for the U.S. House seat currently held by U.S. Representative Dale Strong, R-Alabama, told APR ahead of the April Democratic primary that her campaign is seeking to promote “qualified, capable leadership at all levels of government.”
“We’re not seeing that anywhere right now, much less in our sitting representative,” Duvieilh said.
“I have a daughter. My husband’s a disabled veteran. I work full-time to make sure that our mortgage gets paid. I know what it is like to work your way up to a point where you can’t get any further because of the systems that are in place,” she added. “The working-class has got to band together so that we can change the things that are keeping us from surviving and thriving. Our children deserve a better future.”
Duvieilh, who is originally from southern Mississippi, said she has been fascinated with politics and public policy since high school.
“I myself have really been into policy and legislation and politics since I was about 16 years old,” Duvieilh said. “I took U.S. AP history. I went to D.C. for a policy intensive while I was in high school—wrote my first piece of legislation all the way back then. So, I’ve always kind of had a love of politics.”
The candidate went on to pursue and receive a bachelor’s degree in public policy from The University of Mississippi’s Trent Lott Leadership Institute, and later a master’s in public administration and nonprofit leadership.
After receiving her master’s degree, Duvieilh taught seventh grade English and language arts at a school in south Mississippi, before enrolling at The University of Southern Mississippi to obtain a doctorate in education administration.
Duvieilh currently works with software company Tyler Technologies, where she began training public accountants and advising city administrators on software purchasing and budgeting, and later became a product analyst.
“I advise the developers on making sure that the software does government accounting according to generally accepted accounting principles and government accounting and auditing policy and legislation and things like that,” she explained. “So, I’m a functional policy analyst and government accounting expert.”
Duvieilh first moved to District 5 five years ago when her husband obtained a job in the Huntsville area.
“I have always loved north Alabama,” she said.
“The Disney Channel used to do this segment called ‘Imagineer That.’ And I remember when ‘Imagineer That’ went to the Space Camp, and I was like, ‘How cool is that place?’” she continued. “And I’ve always just wanted my children to get to grow up around that innovative kind of experience. So, we got here as fast as we could, is what I say.”
Upon moving to Madison County, Duvieilh said she immediately began getting involved in the public sector and eventually began asking where she would be of most service as an elected official.
“The overwhelming response I got was that they wanted me to run for Congress,” she said. “I started looking into it, and at the end of the day, I am more qualified for that position than Dale Strong is, and I will say that, and I will go to the mat about that, because I firmly believe it.”
When asked how her approach to serving in the House would differ from Strong’s, Duvieilh emphasized her experience in policy development and research alongside her commitment to collaborating with her peers in the House and constituents.
“My approach will be collaboration, and it will also be one in which I’m not going to be relying on lobbyists to come in and tell me what a piece of legislation will do. I will know from reading it. I will know what questions to ask, and I will know that off the bat, it’s not going to take me two to three terms to get familiar with it,” she said.
“I do not think that every district in the U.S. needs someone with that knowledge, but I firmly believe that our district does,” Duvieilh said. “There is so much government spending in this district that it comes from so many different pieces of legislation, different organizations, different government entities, that having someone who is not overwhelmed by that information, but understands it is extremely important for us.”
Duvieilh’s campaign has emphasized the candidate’s background in education alongside her commitment to supporting funding for public education.
“If we do not have a strong, equitable and fair education system in place, the rest of our society is going to suffer,” she said. “We’ve torn down the Department of Education, and it’s going to have to be rebuilt. I hate that that happened, but we have a unique opportunity to rebuild it correctly.”
“But it is going to take having people like me at the table, who have had classroom experience, who have administrative understanding and how schools function, for that to be done the way it needs to be done,” Duvieilh added.
The candidate has also promised that, should she be elected to Congress, she will work to improve citizens’ ability to connect with and share their concerns directly with their congressional representative.
“I want to have at least two town halls in every county, in this district, every year. And I don’t think that that is an unachievable goal, especially in a world where remote work has been, you know, really, I can’t say it’s been perfected, but it’s definitely growing,” she said.
Duvieilh expressed her hope that her commitment to public availability and accountability, alongside her educational background, would enable her to serve District 5 residents more directly than Strong, who she characterized as using divisive rhetoric that seeks to utilize citizens’ ignorance rather than illustrate the nuances of issues.
“One of my biggest things that I have a problem with that Strong and other representatives like him are doing right now is I feel that they are playing on the ignorance of the general public,” Duvieilh said. “They’re playing on the fact that the public doesn’t understand all these moving parts and using it against them. It will be of the utmost importance to me to help the public understand what those moving parts are, so that they can tell me how they want me to vote on something.”
Describing how her approach to serving in the House may differ from other representatives in her party, Duvieilh argued that many incumbent representatives on both sides of the aisle have become too comfortable with the status quo and called for new voices in the House to improve representation.
“Right now, what we are seeing is a systemic issue that is not necessarily a partisan issue. I think we’re seeing a lot of people rest on their laurels, rest on the comfort in the position, and really just kind of go through the motions,” she said. “We need new people to shake things up, to bring new perspectives, to say just because that’s the way you’ve always done it doesn’t mean that’s the way we have to continue doing it.”
The candidate also said she would work to ensure large corporations, such as Amazon and Boeing, pay their fair share of tax revenue to help support public schools, expressing opposition to major corporations advocating for lower millage rates, which fund public education.
“They, then, are undercutting funding that our schools need. So that’s something that is going to have to be addressed,” she said.
“If you’re coming here and you are buying property and you are increasing our property values, our schools should be increasing in value as well,” she said. “But the majority, no, all, of the schools in Alabama’s 5th District receive a large portion of federal funding.”
Duvieilh argued that the biggest problem facing her district is an emphasis on economic and infrastructural growth and development, without adequate guidelines to ensure growth is sustainable or progresses as planned.
“They can’t get the cart back behind the horse,” she said. “That’s the biggest issue in this district, is we are seeing a lot of growth, and we’re not seeing any plans for that.”
Duvieilh pointed to the more than $5 million in funds secured by Strong for Fiscal Year 2026 to go toward water system improvements in Ardmore.
“That’s something that we needed him to do. Kudos to him for that,” she said. “But I did the math. He has, secured enough funding to update it to what Ardmore needs right now. But if you look at construction plans for growth in that area, it’s not going to be enough in five years.”
“So, we are constantly playing catch-up. And it doesn’t need to be that way. We need to have five, 10, 15 and 20-year plans, not just for what we want as population growth and extra tax revenue, but how we’re going to handle the pressure of that growth. And I’m not seeing any of that,” she added.
Duvieilh called for stronger legislative guidelines for how federally allocated dollars are spent as a means of ensuring government funding promotes genuine and sustainable growth for the state.
“One of the other issues we’re having is that once funding reaches Montgomery, there’s not a lot of guardrails on how that has to be spent, and it’s getting hung up at the administrative level and not actually making it down to a net positive for the communities,” she said.
“It will be of the utmost importance to me to make sure that legislation from the federal level that is directing funding does everything it can to prevent that from happening and make it enforceable when that money doesn’t end up where it’s supposed to go,” Duvieilh continued.
The candidate has also emphasized healthcare policy reform, such as implementing a law that bars hospital emergency rooms from closing unless there is another emergency room within a certain distance and revising the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act to require that insurance companies pay for emergency care.
“Insurance companies are not incentivized to cover that care, which is putting more strain on our hospitals, because now they’re having to eat the cost of that care. So, we have to amend EMTALA to hold insurance companies accountable for providing that care,” she said. “So that emergency rooms are not losing money.”
Describing the ways she’d work to improve public health resources in District 5, Duvieilh emphasized her desire for greater public funds dedicated to addressing mental health crisis cases.
“As it stands, we have criminal response teams for emergent situations, we have fire response teams and we have medical response teams, but we don’t have anyone who is specifically trained in dealing with mental health crises,” she said. “At that point you’re putting police officers in the same position that we now have teachers in, which is where they’re being expected to be everything all the time, and it’s just too much for any one person.”
When asked to explain what she felt set her apart from fellow Democratic nomination contenders Jeremy Devito and Andrew Sneed, Duvieilh highlighted her experience in policy writing and analysis.
“The number one thing that I was hearing from people as I was out in the community was that they were frustrated that [Strong] ran unopposed last time,” she remarked. “The reason that I am still in this race, the reason that I haven’t deferred to a different candidate is because I believe that we are sorely lacking qualified, competent, capable leadership at the federal level, and I also firmly believe that I am the person to do that.”
Duvieilh went on to argue that if a Democrat is to seriously challenge Strong, they must be able to build a campaign that goes beyond attacks on the incumbent.
“If your campaign is built on an attack against Dale Strong, it’s not a strong campaign,” she said.
“They have endless amounts of money, so you have to have more than just the ability to run ads. You have to have something that they can’t counter-message. And come November 3, 2026, they will not be able to counter-message the fact that I am more qualified than Dale Strong to do Dale Strong’s job,” Duvieilh said.
Duvieilh emphasized that she would endorse a different Democrat candidate for Strong’s seat, should they win the nomination.
“I will throw my support behind any candidate that the Democratic Party has chosen to put up against Dale Strong. I support the will of the people,” she said.
In September, Strong had raised more than $730,000 for his campaign, with more than $1 million in cash on hand.
As of the end of September, the Duvieilh campaign had raised roughly $9,700, with roughly $4,000 on hand.
Reports from the same month show that Devito had raised roughly the same amount as Duvieilh, with around $6,000 on hand, and Sneed leading Democratic contenders with $230,000 raised and $175,000 on hand.
The Democratic primary for District 5 will take place on May 19, 2026. The general election is scheduled for November 3.
