August 17, 2026 — Opelika, AL
Alabama voters will choose a governor in November between two men who have both sat in the United States Senate. That is unusual, and it comes with an unusual gift: an official, public, unspun record of how each one spent his time there.
What follows is that record. Every figure comes from Congress.gov, GovTrack’s roll-call database, CQ’s vote studies or Voteview. Nothing here comes from a campaign.
Bills: one writes a lot, one signed onto a lot
Tommy Tuberville has introduced 313 bills and resolutions in five and a half years — about 57 a year. Doug Jones introduced 82 in three years, about 27 a year. By that measure Tuberville is far busier.
Turn the page over and the picture reverses. Jones cosponsored 808 bills in three years; Tuberville has cosponsored 705 in five and a half. Per year, that is 269 to 128. Jones spent his time attaching himself to other members’ legislation; Tuberville spends his introducing his own.
Neither habit is virtuous by itself. Introducing bills that go nowhere is cheap, and cosponsoring by the hundred can be a way of showing up in the record without doing much. The test is what survives.
Laws: one apiece
Each man has exactly one bill that became law under his own name.
Jones wrote the Civil Rights Cold Case Records Collection Act of 2018, signed in January 2019, which forces the declassification of federal files on unsolved civil-rights-era murders. He wrote it with Republican Ted Cruz, and it reaches directly into Alabama’s history.
Tuberville wrote the Supporting Families of the Fallen Act, signed in October 2022, raising the life-insurance ceiling for servicemembers and their survivors.
Both men also got provisions enacted by folding them into larger bills — Jones’s rural health measure rode the 2018 farm bill; Tuberville’s ban on males in women’s sports at the service academies rode last December’s defense bill. That is how most of Congress’s work actually gets done, and it counts.
On cosponsored bills that became law, Jones has 26 to Tuberville’s 10.
Committees
Tuberville sits on Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans’ Affairs and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and chairs subcommittees on two of them. He credits his defense seat with securing roughly $2.5 billion for Alabama installations in the latest defense bill.
Jones held no gavels, for a reason worth stating plainly: he was a freshman Democrat in a Republican Senate for his entire tenure. Comparing the two men’s committee power compares majority to minority, not ability to ability.
The most consequential thing Tuberville did with his Armed Services seat was his 2023 blockade of roughly 450 senior military promotions over a Pentagon abortion-travel policy — a ten-month hold he abandoned in December 2023 without winning the policy change. Supporters call it the only leverage a junior senator had. Critics, including several Republican colleagues who confronted him on the Senate floor, called it damage to military readiness. Voters can weigh it either way, but it belongs on the ledger.
Showing up
Here neither man comes out clean.
Jones missed 41 of 993 roll-call votes, 4.1 percent, when the Senate median was 1.8 percent. Tuberville has missed 124 of 2,519, 4.9 percent, against a median of 2.8. Each was the second-most absent member of his sophomore class.
The absences cluster around campaigns. Jones missed 17.8 percent of votes in the last quarter of 2020 while fighting to keep his seat. Tuberville has missed 12.2 percent and 14.0 percent in the first two quarters of this year, the worst stretch of his Senate career, while running for governor. His first two years were strong — 2.0 percent missed in the 117th Congress.
The pattern reached the Agriculture Committee on Aug. 6. The farm bill failed to advance on a 10–11 party-line vote; Tuberville, a member of the committee, was present earlier in the markup but not for the final vote, and his proxy did not count, because committee rules do not allow proxies to carry a final vote. In fairness, his presence would not have saved the bill — an 11–11 tie fails too, and Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell was also absent, recovering from a June fall. Chairman John Boozman recessed the markup and will try again in September. But for a state where agriculture is a top industry, an Alabama senator missing the farm bill vote is worth noting.
How they vote
Tuberville votes with his party 98.4 percent of the time. CQ scored him at 99 percent party unity in 2024 and 9 percent agreement with then-President Biden.
Jones was one of the most conservative Democrats in the chamber. FiveThirtyEight put his agreement with President Trump’s positions at 35.4 percent, sixth-highest among Senate Democrats; Voteview rated him more conservative than 98 percent of his own caucus.
One caveat on the cosponsorship figures: they count Senate measures in each member’s official record, so the totals are best compared to each other rather than treated as absolute.
That is the record. The campaign will tell you what it means.
