The Frequency

For most of the primary, Barry Moore had the cleaner story. He had the name recognition, the congressional seat, the Trump endorsement, and a first-place finish on May 19 with nearly 40% of the vote. Jared Hudson, a former Navy SEAL running for office for the first time, finished 14 points behind.

That gap has since closed to the margin of error.

A poll of 600 likely runoff voters conducted May 28 showed Hudson leading 48.7% to 39.2%, the first time he had led in any public survey of the race. A separate survey from Remington Research Group put Hudson at 41% to Moore’s 40%, a difference that falls inside the poll’s plus-or-minus four-point margin of error.

The split behind the numbers is what campaigns are watching. Moore’s support is concentrated among high-turnout Trump Republicans, exactly the voters most likely to show up on a Tuesday in June. Hudson’s coalition skews younger and more moderate, drawing heavily from the Birmingham area where he is based. Whether his voters are as motivated as Moore’s on June 16 is the question neither poll can answer.

Moore still has the endorsement. Hudson’s argument has always been that Washington is broken and sending another congressman won’t fix it. He got to the runoff on that pitch. Now he has to hold it for eleven days.

The Democratic side has its own runoff: attorney Everett Wess and businessman Dakarai Larriett. Wess led the primary at 39.5% to Larriett’s 29.2%. The Democratic nominee faces a long climb in November in a state Donald Trump carried by a wide margin in 2024.

June 16. Eleven days.

Sheila McNeil had already qualified. Then the rules changed.

On May 27, McNeil, the Democratic nominee for Place 2 on the Alabama Public Service Commission, filed a federal lawsuit against Governor Kay Ivey and Attorney General Steve Marshall in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama. The target is House Bill 475, the law enacted on April 3 that restructures the PSC from three statewide elected commissioners to seven district-based seats, with four positions to be appointed by the governor.

McNeil’s argument rests on the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Her lawsuit contends that absentee voting in the PSC elections had already begun when HB 475 passed, and that changing the structure of the race mid-election violated the constitutional rights of candidates and voters who made decisions under the original rules.

The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction. If granted, either could freeze the appointment process before Ivey’s July 15 deadline. Legislative leaders were required to submit shortlists of three nominees per appointment slot to the governor by June 1. That deadline has passed. The appointments have not been made.

McNeil’s November opponent will be either Chris Beeker, the Republican incumbent, or Jim Ziegler, a former state auditor. The two are in their own runoff on June 16. (More on that in Story 4.)

The suit adds a new front to an ongoing fight. The Frequency covered the PSC restructuring in Issue #1 and the July 15 appointment deadline in Issue #7. Now there is a federal court in the picture. The commissioners shaping Alabama Power’s rates may ultimately be decided as much in the Middle District as in Montgomery.

A hearing date has not been publicly announced as of this writing.

Alabama’s reading instruction just changed. Not by a little.

Effective June 1, 2026, a new law sponsored by Senator Donnie Chesteen and Representative Leigh Hulsey prohibits the use of three-cueing in Alabama public school classrooms and requires all reading instruction to be grounded in the Science of Reading. The law strengthens the Alabama Literacy Act of 2019, which established the original framework for early literacy improvement in the state.

Three-cueing is a reading strategy that teaches children to guess unfamiliar words using context clues, including pictures, sentence meaning, and surrounding words, rather than decoding them phonetically. Reading researchers have challenged the approach for years, arguing it trains children to approximate rather than decode. The Science of Reading, by contrast, is built on explicit phonics instruction and the systematic development of decoding skills.

The law is now in effect for Chambers County schools.

That specificity matters. In Chambers County, 48.8% of students are economically disadvantaged. Research has found that children who cannot read proficiently by the end of third grade are significantly more likely to drop out before finishing high school. Some studies put it at four times the rate of proficient readers. In communities where the margin between a sustainable career and a structural ceiling is already thin, early reading instruction is not a technical pedagogy debate. It is a direct economic intervention.

The Alabama Reading Initiative has provided coaching and support for Alabama schools since the Literacy Act’s passage in 2019. The transition to a fully Science of Reading-aligned classroom is a process, not a switch, and local schools have been working toward it for several years. What changed on June 1 is that the old approach is now prohibited. Not just discouraged.

Chambers County K-12 families won’t see a new curriculum appear overnight. What they will see, over the next several years, is whether this law produces what the research says it should.

Alabama voters going to the polls on June 16 will have more than the Senate runoff on their ballots. The Republican primary for Public Service Commission Place 2 is also headed to a runoff, and the winner will help determine what Alabama Power charges every month.

Chris Beeker, the Republican incumbent on the PSC, faces Jim Ziegler, a former Alabama state auditor, in the runoff. Both advanced from the May 19 primary. The winner faces Democratic nominee Sheila McNeil in November. McNeil filed a federal lawsuit last week challenging the PSC restructuring. (See Story 2.)

The PSC has regulated Alabama Power as a rate-setting body for decades. Under the restructured commission, if it survives the legal challenge, Place 2 will become one of seven seats, with the other four filled by Ivey appointments. What has historically been a low-visibility race is now, between the lawsuit and the expansion, one of the more consequential regulatory elections on the June 16 ballot.

Beeker runs on regulatory experience and an incumbent’s record. Ziegler built his reputation as a fiscal watchdog during his time as state auditor. The question for Place 2 voters is which kind of oversight they want from the body that signs off on Alabama Power’s rate requests.

Chambers County voters have been watching their power bills since Issue #1. June 16 offers a direct say in who watches them back.

Growth tends to arrive before the infrastructure that supports it. Chambers County is finding out whether the gap is manageable.

As of early 2026, Valley’s residential development pipeline included more than 10 active subdivisions with approximately 600 homes planned for construction. That represents a meaningful shift for a county where population growth has been measured rather than dramatic in recent years. More homes mean more families, more children in schools, more vehicles on local roads, more demand on water and sewer capacity, and more tax revenue if the growth is managed well.

The county is not only looking inward. In December 2025, South Korean economic development advisors toured key industrial sites in Chambers County as part of a broader Alabama trade outreach effort. The Chambers County Development Authority, which has long-standing relationships with Korean-owned automotive suppliers in the county, is hoping the engagement leads to expanded investment from additional Korean industrial sectors.

The county’s existing industrial base spans forest products, automotive, food and beverage, warehousing and logistics, plastics, healthcare, and telecommunications. It is a mix that has made the county competitive for workforce investment but that requires ongoing infrastructure commitment to remain attractive. Active projects include the revitalization of a 22-acre mill site in Valley and completion of the Double Drive sewer project, which expands capacity ahead of anticipated growth.

The development pipeline is real. The challenge, as it is in most smaller Alabama counties seeing renewed interest, is whether water, sewer, road, and school investments keep pace with the permits being pulled.

Chambers County has what developers and international trade offices are coming to see. What it does next with that attention will determine whether this moment is a trend or a chapter.