After November, Alabama will have a new governor, the newest slate of constitutional officers in a generation, and a brand new state house.
The one thing it will not have is a shortage of people who are absolutely certain they should be in charge of all three.
But those who actually are – can be found on this year’s list.
As Yellowhammer News celebrates its 15th anniversary, in a special edition of this year’s Power & Influence: Top 50, we’re taking stock of the most effective figures in the modern era of Alabama politics – and making picks of who will dominate in the next.
The honorees featured in this year’s edition are some of the most proven power players of the past decade-plus. And those who have been paying attention to our rankings for that long know that we’re not just guessing.
FULL CLASS OF 2026: 11-21 / 30-21 / 40-31 / 50-41 / Who’s Next?
Informed by those who know best, including Montgomery itself, each year we recognize the top individuals in government, politics, and business who leverage their power and influence to set the agenda, move the ball – and when necessary, stop things cold.
Here’s our look behind the curtain of who’s running state government right now more than ever:
10. Arthur Orr
Alabama Senate Finance & Taxation Education Committee Chairman
If you want to know where the money is in Alabama, ask Arthur Orr. If you want to know where it was, also ask Arthur Orr. He’s been writing the state’s education budget for twelve years and counting, and the new State House.
Twenty years in the Senate. Twelve with the gavel on the largest checkbook in state government. Four years before that running the general fund through proration. It’s the kind of chairmanship the right people rarely volunteer themselves for, which is probably why nobody else has ever survived it quite like he did.
Governors come. Governors go. Pro Tems rotate. Members get sworn in and sworn out. But Orr walks in every session with a folder nobody asked him to bring and walks out with most of what he came in for to begin with.
With the ETF not yet still enrolled and returned across the street at time of print, somewhere, right now, a lobbyist is rehearsing a pitch in a mirror. A lawmaker is texting a colleague “how does Arthur Orr feel about…” – but Orr is probably out jogging or planning his next trip to Nepal.
One of six Power & Influence: Top 50 awardees in the list’s existence to appear every year, Orr is the only lawmaker among them, and stands to be the most powerful in the next. Watch this space.
9. Danny Garrett
Alabama House Ways and Means Education Committee
We’re not sure if the $10.9 billion Alabama education trust fund is the largest balance sheet Danny Garrett has ever managed, but we imagine it’s the one that has made him the most friends. Don’t take that literally.
It’s a lot of work each and every year. It’s both time consuming and exhausting and requires an attention to detail that only a couple of men in the building actually enjoy.
But if you want insight into just how powerful Danny Garrett is, he inherited the ETF at $7.7 billion. He will hand it off this year just north of $11 billion.
Every year in between has been a record. Zero rounds of proration. Zero excuses. Six straight budgets that cleared his committee looking exactly the way he wanted them to look – which, incidentally, is usually the only way they clear his committee at all.
The CHOOSE Act was his. The RAISE Act was his. The $190 million grocery tax cut was his. Just to name a few.
None of it showed up with a bow on it. All of it showed up with his signature in the margins. He’ll do it again next year.
In the new State House, his famous rapport with Arthur Orr, now at the other end of the rotunda rather than on different floors, is the single most durable working relationship in Alabama politics.
8. Jimmy Parnell
President, Alabama Farmers Federation
Jimmy Parnell has climbed big on this list since it was last published. That doesn’t usually happen to a man who has already been running one of the most powerful organizations in the state for fourteen years. It happens when the organization pulls off something nobody thought it could do.
This quadrennium, ALFA made good on a long-time wish list ambition of providing health plans to members through their own organization. Every year it was just an idea. It died quietly in the Legislature. Then, last year, Parnell devised a plan to send it back with a bigger coalition and the full grassroots weight of a Federation present in every one of Alabama’s 67 counties.
Parnell built FarmPAC into what is said to be by many, including himself, as the most intimidating venue in state politics. And the candidates who have walked into that room know it’s not an exaggeration. So far in 2026, the Federation endorsement remained a primary-defining event, and it won’t be long until they might have more math to back that up.
FarmPAC was the first institutional endorsement of Tommy Tuberville’s gubernatorial campaign, and the relationship predates that by nearly a decade.
All told, when Tuberville is sworn in in 2027, lawmakers set up shop in the new State House, and ALFA’s legislative crew can walk to it from their new HQ, Parnell will have never been more powerful.
7. Will Ainsworth
Lieutenant Governor of Alabama
Will Ainsworth took an office most of Alabama had stopped paying attention to and turned it into one of the most consequential lieutenant governorships in the state’s modern history.
The man who turned “everybody’s frustrated by going to the beach” into one of the most popular political issues of the decade in widening I-65 from the Tennessee State Line to Mobile won’t be on a ballot for the first time in over a decade. And for that, we’re a poorer state.
But while breaking through the red tape of a 12-year run in public office – we don’t think he’s slowing down anytime soon.
Voters know him. Lawmakers like him. Donors trust him. And maybe most importantly – nobody’s ever had to “re-learn” who Will Ainsworth is. At no point did he compromise who he was for who he wanted to be next. And for that, we’re a richer state.
That consistency has a way of compounding.
He led the charge to cut the grocery tax. He made sure his voice was heard on major infrastructure undertakings – loud and clear. He created new commissions that made the state government more responsive to the needs of important constituencies like veterans, military families, Alabama’s aerospace sector, parents of school-age kids, and the next generation of Alabama’s workforce.
He has been on this list every year since 2018. He has been in the top ten since 2021.
The interesting question about Will Ainsworth is not what he has done. But what he is going to do with the many extra lanes he has built.
6. Stephanie Bryan
Poarch Creek Indians, Tribal Chair & CEO
When Stephanie Bryan first took a seat at the Tribal Council table in 2006, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians was a sovereign nation of about 3,000 members and a budget that barely registered in the broader Alabama economy.
20 years later, the only federally recognized tribe in Alabama is a $4 billion-a-year economic engine with 7,400 in-state jobs.
The PCI economy has grown roughly 1,000% on her watch. That is not hyperbole.
Bryan became the first female Tribal Chair and CEO in 2014 and has held both jobs ever since.
She arrived at the Tribal Council table by way of two jobs, federally funded tribal housing, and a college degree earned at night while raising children. Most people in Alabama politics would have built a brand around that. She built an economy instead.
However, she is fiercely humble. Each time she is recognized with any distinction for the past two decades of historic achievement for the Tribe, she credits the wisdom and tenacity of those around her.
What makes her a top-ten entry on this list, year after year, is that almost every major political question in this state – economic development, rural investment, federal relations, enforcement priorities, and the eternal legal gaming negotiation – eventually has to route through Atmore.
5. Clay Ryan
Alabama Power Company, Senior Vice President, External Affairs
Let’s pause for a second. Very few people deal directly with the Federal Reserve, but everyone feels its impact. If Alabama had its own version, it would be Clay Ryan.
Sharp, well-connected, and consistently ahead of the room, Clay’s influence has only grown since he first appeared on this list at No. 14. Even watching it year by year doesn’t fully explain how he’s now solidly number five.
You won’t find him in most meetings. He already knows what happened in them. And if he ever writes a memoir, a lot of powerful people would get nervous.
Underestimate him if you want. He just keeps outperforming.
4. Liz Filmore
Chief of Staff to Governor Kay Ivey
The role of Chief of Staff to a state executive is not a job. It’s a calling. It’s the willingness to be the last person in the building every night and the first one in the next morning, and to spend every minute in between making sure nothing the principal needs to think about reaches them until it has been thought about at least three times by someone else.
Most people who take on this job either burn out or harden up. Liz Filmore did neither.
She is the longest-tenured member of Kay Ivey’s inner circle, dating back to 2013. She signed on in 2013 with a lieutenant governor nobody expected to become governor – and rose, alongside her, into a job no woman had ever held.
Throughout her time as Chief of Staff, Filmore’s influence has come from a simple reality: by the time the meeting starts, the work is already done. The meeting just confirms it for everyone else.
What they built inside that office is the record – the Ivey administration did not miss.
In a state where governing usually means 30 calendar days of trench warfare between an executive branch with ideas and a legislature with a memory, Governor Ivey and her closest confidant have converted an extraordinary share of their asks into law.
This isn’t to say it wasn’t easy. It was tremendously difficult. But she and her boss fought the fights together. And continued to outkick their coverage again and again.
In the meantime, Alabama’s next governor will come from outside the building. The desk waiting for him was organized by Liz Filmore.
3. Nathaniel Ledbetter
Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives
Two legislative sessions happened in the Alabama House this year.
The one people are going to read about ten years from now is the one where the Speaker passed a record education budget, expanded the CHOOSE Act to universal eligibility, expanded the RAISE Act for the kids who needed it most, cut taxes again, defended property rights against the kind of zoning interference that makes $800 million data centers go elsewhere, and treated one-time federal money like a one-time problem instead of a recurring revenue source.
The other one is the one a small number of people walked into in January having quietly decided would end with the Speaker losing.
The Speaker did not lose. We are not going to recap the rest, partly out of charity.
What we will say is that the authority of a Speaker is not to avoid dissent. The job is to win through it.
Nathaniel Ledbetter just emerged from the most proving session of his speakership more proven than he has ever been. Among his members, before his biggest critics, and to the people of Alabama, who will spend the next eight months realizing how much of what they wanted from Montgomery already happened.
What comes next was being built off-camera the whole time.
The Governor-elect and the Speaker who is going to hand him a working chamber on day one have been talking longer than anyone outside the building realizes.
The next quadrennium starts with Ledbetter as the only member of the original legislative leadership triumvirate still in his original chair. He earned it.
2. Garlan Gudger
Alabama Senate President Pro Tempore
There is no precedent in the all-time history of this list for the arc Garlan Gudger has just traveled. He appeared for the first time in 2023. He took the gavel fifteen months ago. He is sitting at #2 today.
Power is about what you do with what you have, and in fifteen months, Gudger has turned the Alabama Senate’s structural ceiling into its working baseline.
Gudger, like the Pro Tems before him, will tell you the job is simple. Read the caucus. Move the chamber in the direction it is already prepared to go.
But what he doesn’t say out loud, because he does not need to, is that this particular chamber, with advantages inherent to the Senate, sits on more latent firepower than it has ever been historically willing to unload.
This session, Gudger buried something in writing on his own letterhead, then dug up what was wise to save, and sent it back downstairs 35-0. Gudger showed that while the Senate can certainly kill – it can also resurrect.
We do not yet know the full extent of what Garlan Gudger’s influence and power will measure.
But we do know he will have one of the few seats at the table when the next term’s agenda is set.
1. Kay Ivey
Governor of Alabama
Let’s just say it. Kay Ivey is the most powerful Governor of Alabama of the 21st century, and it has not been close for a long time.
She began as the lieutenant governor, but on an unscheduled afternoon in April 2017 when she was sworn in as governor, she declared it a “dark day in Alabama” as well as “one of opportunity.”
This day began both the modern era of a lifelong public servant and the most consequential reign by a state executive in many decades.
Going back to 2012 when the first edition of this list was published, Kay Ivey was among its ranks. We described her then in part:
“It’s uncharted territory for a Republican Lt. Governor to be working with a Republican majority in the legislature — so to some extent her role is still developing. The bottom line is that she’s one heart beat away from the Governor’s office.”
Fourteen years later, we’ve come a long time since then. Ivey has been featured in every single Power & Influence: Top 50 list since. With seven back-to-back appearances at #1 – she is effectively its grand champion.
Not only the most powerful governor of the modern era. The most powerful person period. Her accomplishments speak for themselves.
No step too high for a high stepper. All these years later, she never missed a single one.
