POINT CLEAR, Ala. — Alabama Republican voters’ priority issues ahead of the 2026 primary elections are inflation and cost of living, taxes and government spending, and illegal immigration and border security.
Infrastructure and roads and jobs and the economy rounded out the top five list of issues, according to recent polling.
“Almost 80% of Republican primary voters have a No. 1 or No. 2 issue in the economic sphere (of inflation, taxes and government spending, and jobs and economy),” Mitchell Brown, a partner with the polling firm Cygnal, said Saturday. Brown was speaking at the Business Council of Alabama’s annual Government Affairs Conference attended by about 850 people, including elected officials, business leaders and lobbyists.
Meanwhile, nearly 59% of GOP voters want state legislators to focus on economic issues rather than cultural ones, Brown said. About 34% said cultural issues should be priority.
The numbers are from a poll of 400 Republican primary voters in late July.
Brown said they want a better economic future for their children.
“These economic undertones are exactly what is going to not only win their vote, it’s going to help these people grow,” Brown told the crowd that included candidates for state and federal office in 2026.
“Economic policy is just good politics,” he said.
Other polling shared showed U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the only major candidate for governor in 2026, had a 69% favorable rating, 37.5% of that being highly favorable.
The firm also did some early polling in the U.S. Senate race to replace Tuberville. Current Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced his candidacy already. U.S. Congressman Barry Moore, R-Enterprise, is expected to announce his bid later this week.
Earlier this summer, Auburn basketball coach Bruce Pearl flirted with a Senate bid, but more recently downplayed speculation he’d run.
Cygnal last month asked GOP voters who they’d vote for in a Senate race today. Twenty-four percent said Marshall; 12.9% said Pearl, 8.8% said Moore and 3% said Jared Hudson. That left 51.4% undecided
When Cygnal asked the question again without Pearl as a candidate, that undecided number jumped to 57.5%.
Cygnal asked voters how supportive the state is of small- and medium-sized businesses. About 9.7% said very supportive, 29.5% said supportive. Nearly 25% said either very unsupportive or unsupportive.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has a nearly 80% favorable rating among Alabama Republicans, including 62% highly favorable. Cygnal’s national polling on Trump showed a nearly 47% favorable rating.
Those numbers won’t change in the next four years, Brown said.
“There are a lot of people who have an unfavorable opinion of Trump that voted for (him) and they knew what they were getting this time around,” Brown said. “So the news can go out and say whatever, there could be a bad spin on a story, and those people won’t care because they went to the ballot box and selected him because they thought their life was easier in 2019 than it was in 2024.”