A vote for Jerry Carl in the Congressional District 1 primary election is a vote for years of trusted experience, the former member of the U.S. House of Representatives said. Carl, who represented the Gulf Coast district for two terms, is seeking to reclaim the seat in an unusual special election that has compressed a full congressional campaign into a single summer.
An election born in the courts
On Tuesday, Aug. 11, voters in Mobile, Baldwin, Escambia and Covington counties will head to the polls in a special election made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan in June. That decision allowed Alabama to discard a court-ordered congressional voting district map that had split the Gulf Coast, instead using a different map federal judges had previously deemed unconstitutional in 2023.
The sequence of maps and rulings reshaped politics across south Alabama. The court-ordered map, drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act, had taken parts of Mobile County — including much of the city’s traditionally Democratic precincts — and joined them to the Black Belt in a second majority-Black district, cutting the 1st District down to a coastal sliver and pushing it into the Wiregrass. When the Supreme Court allowed the state to revert to its earlier configuration, the coastal district was restored largely to its historic boundaries, and the representative elected under the interim map — Barry Moore, R-Enterprise — chose to run statewide rather than seek the reshaped seat, opening it for the special election.
Ballots for the Democratic Party will not include a primary contest because Daphne minister Clyde Jones is the party’s sole candidate in Congressional District 1. Jones will await the winner of the Republican primary, a position that lets the GOP contest serve, in practice, as the decisive race in a district that has not elected a Democrat in generations.
Carl, John Mills, Austin Sidwell and Lucas Burger are on the Republican Party ballot. The candidate with the most votes will win; no runoff will be held — a rule particular to special elections that makes turnout, rather than a second round of campaigning, the deciding factor.
Carl’s road back
Carl previously represented District 1 in the U.S. House from 2021 to 2025, but was defeated by U.S. Rep. Barry Moore, R-Enterprise, after the district was reconfigured to include the Wiregrass counties. The 2024 primary pitted the two incumbents against each other in a district redrawn by the courts, and Moore — whose home territory had been added to the coastal seat — prevailed. Despite that defeat, Carl said he never lost sight of returning to elected office.
Carl came to Congress after a career in Mobile County politics and the trucking industry, first winning the seat in 2020 when he unseated a veteran incumbent in the Republican primary. In Washington he positioned himself as a Transportation and Appropriations player whose priorities were the ports, highways and shipbuilding programs of the Gulf Coast, and he has run his comeback campaign explicitly on that record.
Affordability first
The former Mobile County commissioner said “affordability, without a doubt,” is the biggest issue in the district. If elected, Carl said he would work to reduce fuel, utility and food costs by recruiting new companies with higher wages to South Alabama — the economic development pitch that has defined coastal politics for two decades, from the Airbus assembly line at Brookley to the industrial expansions along the Mobile River.
Carl was reluctant to weigh in on local concerns about data centers planned for Calvert and Prichard, which some residents fear will raise utility bills and harm the environment. The projects — large-scale computing facilities that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water — have become flashpoints in communities across the Southeast, and the north Mobile County sites have drawn organized opposition from residents worried about rates and industrial development in rural areas.
“I want to learn more about the data centers before I make my mind up,” Carl said. “People have also got to keep in mind China has spent a lot of money running campaigns to try to keep us from building these data centers. There’s got to be a reason there.”
Coal ash and the Mobile River
Carl also weighed in on the long-running dispute over 21 million tons of coal ash buried in an unlined pond at Alabama Power’s Plant Barry along the Mobile River. The pond — a remnant of decades of coal-fired generation at the plant — sits in the floodplain north of Mobile, and environmental groups have argued for years that a hurricane or catastrophic flood could send the ash into the river that supplies the region’s drinking water.
He said the utility has done everything the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has asked of it. The EPA previously found that the coal ash pond violates federal environmental protections, but the agency is now poised to approve Alabama Power’s plan to “cap in place” the material rather than require it be excavated and moved to a lined landfill. The cap-in-place approach, which utilities across the Southeast have generally favored, costs a fraction of excavation — a move that can run to billions of dollars per site — but leaves the ash where it is, dependent on the cap and groundwater monitoring to keep it contained.
“If both sides can live with it, I can live with it,” Carl said — a formulation that acknowledged the dispute without resolving it. The environmental coalition pressing for excavation has taken the position that the river’s flooding history makes any unlined impoundment a permanent risk; the utility maintains that its closure plan meets or exceeds every applicable federal standard.
Tolls and the I-10 bridge
While he said he is “strictly against tolls,” Carl said charges for the forthcoming I-10 bridge over the Mobile River may be necessary to get the long-delayed project started this year. “We’ve got to raise more money,” he said. “I’d love to figure out a way to do it without tolls.”
The bridge — a new span of Interstate 10 across the Mobile River to replace the George Wallace Tunnel bottleneck — has been planned, priced and protested for more than a decade. A tolling proposal announced during Carl’s first term drew such opposition that state officials shelved it, leaving the project without a funding plan; a revised tolling plan has since been advanced to finally build the span, and candidates for the coastal seat have had to take a position on it.
The money race
Campaign finance reports from the Federal Election Commission show Carl leading the race by a large margin. As of Wednesday, July 22, Carl had received $1.16 million in contributions and spent more than $865,000, with no personal loans to his campaign — a war chest and spending level that dwarf his rivals’ and reflect both his network of donors from two terms in office and the compressed calendar of a special election.
Burger does not have a campaign registered with the FEC. Sidwell has more than $199,000 in his campaign coffers, including roughly $129,000 in personal loans, and has spent more than $194,000. Mills’ campaign has received more than $18,000 in donations, including roughly $16,500 in personal loans, and has spent more than $15,000. The gap means Carl’s is the only campaign with the resources for sustained television advertising, leaving his opponents to compete through retail politics and social media in the weeks before Aug. 11.
The shape of the district
Alabama’s 1st District covers the state’s entire Gulf Coast footprint: Mobile and Baldwin counties, the Florida-state-line counties of Escambia and Covington included in the special election’s voting area, and the port, shipbuilding and aerospace economies that tie them together. It is a district where the Republican primary has functioned as the real election for decades, and where a candidate’s ability to hold together Mobile’s city precincts, Baldwin County’s suburbs and the small towns of north Mobile County has historically decided who goes to Washington.
The redrawn map that produced the special election restored that geography after two years of litigation, and it did so at the cost of uncertainty. Candidates entered a race whose date, boundaries and rules were all settled by judges and the Supreme Court rather than by the Legislature’s normal calendar — one reason the field includes a former congressman, two lesser-known Republicans and a candidate without a registered campaign committee.
What each candidate offers
Carl’s argument is straightforward experience: two terms in Washington, a record on transportation and defense funding, and the claim — implicit in every stop — that voters know exactly what they would be getting back. His rivals are making the inverse case. Mills and Sidwell, running as fresh faces, have positioned themselves as alternatives to a political class returning to office, while Burger has run without the resources of a registered federal campaign.
In a no-runoff special primary, that dynamic rewards the best-known candidate with the broadest coalition. History along the Gulf Coast suggests crowded special elections break toward name recognition, and Carl’s fundraising edge — more than $1.16 million raised, more than $865,000 already spent — translates directly into the television presence that builds name recognition in a short campaign.
The winner advances to the general election against Clyde Jones, the Daphne minister who runs unopposed for the Democratic nomination. The district’s partisan lean makes the November contest an underdog’s race for the Democrat, but the special primary remains the moment when the seat’s representation is actually decided — and both parties know it.