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Our verdict

LiberalMind endorses Barry Moore

Update — October 24, 2026: This article originally carried a qualified endorsement, the qualification being Moore's January 6, 2021 objection file. LiberalMind's position is now stated plainly: we do not hold certification objections against any candidate, and the qualification is removed. No fact in this article has changed — the votes remain in the record below, as documented fact.

Election Day is November 3. This Class 2 seat is open — Senator Tommy Tuberville is running for governor instead. Only two names are on the ballot. This is the whole race — the records, the platforms, the worst claims against each candidate, and what the sources actually show. Read the research, and decide.

How Alabama got here

Both parties needed runoffs. In the June 16, 2026 Republican runoff, Barry Moore defeated former Navy SEAL Jared Hudson, who had edged out state Attorney General Steve Marshall to reach the runoff. In the Democratic runoff the same day, Everett Wess defeated Dakarai Larriett, roughly 54% to 46% per the Montgomery Advertiser. The general-election ballot carries only two names for this seat: Moore's nomination is certified in an Alabama Secretary of State document dated August 28, 2026, and both names appear on the Etowah County November 3 sample ballot built from Secretary of State data.

One correction the record requires: Craig Jelks, an independent, is listed as "Declared" on Wikipedia and appears in a Ballotpedia FEC finance table. He does not appear on the sample ballot for this seat. A declaration is not a ballot line, and on the evidence gathered he is not on the November ballot. If the Secretary of State confirms otherwise, this page will be updated — articles in this series are living documents through November 3.

The raters are unanimous: Cook Solid R (Oct. 20), Inside Elections Solid R (Oct. 15), Sabato's Crystal Ball Safe R (Oct. 14). The polls agree with room to spare: Cygnal (Oct. 16–17) had Moore 50, Wess 35; the Alabama Poll (Oct. 15–16) had Moore 56, Wess 35; RMG Research (Sept. 21–25) had Moore 54, Wess 33. The money is a rout: per FEC figures through September 30, Moore raised $4,492,066 with $495,914 on hand; Wess raised $116,887 with $11,260 — a fundraising gap of roughly 38 to 1.

Barry Moore (Republican)

His record: Moore served in the Alabama House of Representatives, District 91, from 2010 to 2018. He has been in the U.S. House since 2021 — representing AL-02 until, after court-ordered redistricting, he defeated incumbent Representative Jerry Carl in the 2024 Republican primary and took AL-01 in 2025. He sits on Judiciary and Agriculture. He is from Enterprise, founded a waste-hauling company, Barry Moore Industries, in 1998, and served in the Alabama National Guard and Reserves. He was one of the first politicians anywhere to endorse Donald Trump in 2015, during Trump's first campaign.

His faction, and his votes: Moore is a member of the House Freedom Caucus — per AL.com, he and Representative Gary Palmer are the only Alabama House members in it — and he has described himself as "[r]ated the most conservative Congressman in Alabama by CPAC," in his own statement. Vote Smart's key-vote record shows the consistent hard-line pattern: yes on the HALT Fentanyl Act, yes on the Stop Chinese Fentanyl Act, yes on the Secure America Act. In a 2026 op-ed he backed the SAVE America Act, the voter-ID and election-integrity bill: "Without trust in our elections, everything else unravels."

The endorsements: President Trump endorsed Moore in the runoff, as did Vice President JD Vance and Senate Majority Leader John Thune; he also holds the NRA Political Victory Fund endorsement.

The January 6 record — verified in our verification pass: An early research pass found this item resting on a single advocacy list, so it was not printed until it could be confirmed. It now has been, from the primary record. Moore's name appears in the Congressional Record as a signatory of the written objection to counting Arizona's electoral votes on January 6, 2021 — one of roughly sixty House members who signed Rep. Gosar's objection — and the House roll call on that objection records Moore (AL) voting Yes — the exercise of his constitutional right as a member to object to certification. In his own House column days later, he owned it: "I joined dozens of my House colleagues to object to accepting the electoral college votes from states with clear voting irregularities, using the Constitution as our guide." We print the record because it is the record. We also state our position on it plainly: LiberalMind does not hold certification-objection votes against any candidate, and this one is not weighed against Moore anywhere in this article — not as a flaw, and not as a qualification on the endorsement below. An earlier version of this article priced it as one; the update note at the top records the change.

The town-hall charge — an allegation, labeled as one: Wess's campaign states, in an October 6, 2026 letter, that in the fall of 2025 Moore "left a town hall meeting while constituents were attempting to engage with him." That is the opposing campaign's account. Moore's side of the incident was not located in this pass, and no neutral report of it was found. We print it as what it is — an allegation at the center of his opponent's closing argument — and we note that a congressman who had answered it would not still be carrying it unanswered in October.

Pros: A decade and a half of votes that all point the same direction — there is no mystery about what a Senator Moore would do, and in a Senate decided by organizing votes, predictability in-tent is the product. He built a business before politics. His conference, his president, and his party's Senate leader all vouch for him.

Cons: The record is movement-pure, which means independent judgment is not what is on offer — voters are buying the faction, as he himself advertises. The town-hall allegation stands unanswered. And a candidate who has never had to persuade anyone outside his own coalition's primary electorate has not been tested in the way a six-year term tests.

The flaw, plainly: A sameness, plus an open question. The standing flaw is a reliable faction vote with no documented instance of independent judgment cutting against his team; beside it sits one unanswered charge that he walked out on his own constituents. Alabama voters who want a movement conservative will get exactly one. That is the offer.

Everett Wess (Democratic)

Wess is running for elected partisan office for the first time. His record is professional, not electoral — and one more caveat belongs up front: his résumé as published rests almost entirely on his campaign's own site and announcement. No independent biography corroborating it was pulled in this pass, and we say so rather than laundering campaign copy into findings.

His background, as his campaign states it: A Birmingham attorney. He has served as a Municipal Court Judge in Midfield, as a city prosecutor for Midfield, and as a public defender in Irondale. Before law, he spent more than a decade in Huntsville in technology, engineering, and education — work supporting NASA mission operations, national-security systems, telecommunications, and financial-processing platforms — and was an adjunct instructor at Faulkner University. He is admitted to all Alabama state courts, the state's federal district courts, and the Eleventh Circuit; he is a past president of the Birmingham Bar Association's Criminal Justice Section and of the Greater Birmingham Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, and currently State President of the Alabama New South Coalition.

His platform: Protecting voting rights; expanding access to affordable health care, with emphasis on rural and underserved communities and struggling rural hospitals; strengthening public education; job growth and economic opportunity; and a justice system that "treats every person with dignity." Per the Alabama Reflector, he also supports raising the federal minimum wage and eliminating taxes on tips for service workers. In AgWeb's candidate questionnaire he committed to strengthening farm profitability and risk-management tools and lowering input costs, expanding markets and fair competition with regional processing capacity, and rural investment — roads, broadband, credit access, agricultural research, workforce.

His closing argument — an October 6, 2026 campaign letter titled "Alabama Deserves a Senator Who Shows Up": "As your Senator, I will show up. I will listen. I will hold town halls… I will not walk away from Alabama," built on the town-hall charge against Moore and an affordability message — groceries, child care, health care, prescriptions, rent, gasoline.

Pros: The courtroom breadth is genuinely unusual — prosecutor, public defender, and municipal judge is a résumé that has seen the justice system from every chair in the room, and his platform items on rural hospitals and agriculture are aimed at real Alabama problems. His closing argument is disciplined and aimed at his opponent's one open wound.

Cons: He is unproven in electoral service — a watch posture, not a demerit — but the platform he carries is the generic national Democratic platform with no documented break from it on any contested question. $116,887 raised is not a statewide campaign's war chest; it is a registration fee. And until an independent source corroborates the résumé, voters are asked to take the biography on the campaign's word.

The flaw, plainly: Not a personal flaw — a structural one. This candidacy asks Alabama to hand a Senate organizing vote, priced at full weight in a chamber decided by one or two votes, to the other party's standard program, on the strength of a self-published résumé and a good closing argument. That is not an insult to Everett Wess. It is a description of the transaction.

OUR CALL

LiberalMind endorses Barry Moore.

No extremist-rule shortcut applies here, and none is needed. Moore is a proven in-tent conservative with a fifteen-year voting record that matches his stated platform vote for vote; his flaws are priced above for exactly what they are — faction sameness and an unanswered town-hall allegation. His January 6 objection votes stand in the record above, as documented fact; under LiberalMind's stated position they are not held against him, and they do not qualify this endorsement. A Senate seat is decided by arithmetic — the organizing vote is the first and heaviest fact in this chamber, it decides the majority and the confirmations that compound for decades, and the man across from Moore is an unproven Democrat carrying his party's generic program with no documented break from it, on a résumé his own campaign published. A proven conservative beats an unproven carrier of the other program when the seat decides the majority — so Moore should hold this seat. If the town-hall allegation is ever documented by a neutral source, this page will say so, in an update, with the date on it.

For the complete Election 2026 breakdown — every race, claim by claim — see the full coverage on our website.

Vote early. Research your candidates. Choose the best moderates, whatever their party — no extremism from either side. And encourage your friends and family to do the same.

Sources

Election result — November 4, 2026

Winner: Barry Moore (Republican) — called by the Associated Press. This result was appended on November 4, 2026 (results wave 1); the original article above is unchanged, exactly as published before Election Day.

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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