Gudger predicts no gaming bill until after 2026 elections in Alabama – but 'it's going to come back at some point'

On Thursday afternoon, Alabama Senate Pro Tem Garlan Gudger (R-Cullman) effectively closed the door on passing a gaming bill during the 2025 Legislative session.

“With 12 meeting days remaining in the session, both budgets still awaiting approval, and other important bills and measures demanding focus and attention, the comprehensive gaming bill released today is simply too little, too late, and has too few votes to pass,” Gudger said last week.

On Friday, Gudger went to bat for his decision Friday on WVNN’s “The Dale Jackson Show” by saying the votes were simply not there.

“We ended up pulling our consensus together of all of our colleagues in the Senate, doing an independent vote count, and just looking at the numbers there — we just don’t have the votes,” he said. “There were just two less votes to even get into that topic, and so we decided we needed to shut it down.”

Gudger, now in just his first session as Senate Pro Tem, argued that any gaming bill would have just hindered their ability to pass the other many pieces of important legislation working their way through the final twelve days of session.

“[W]hen you go into it, it takes all the air out of the room,” he explained. “We did not have the votes to go forward, and I’m not going to put my colleagues through what it takes to go through that particular topic, which is the most strenuous topic that we deal with, seems like each year. And so we want to focus on things that they wanted to get done, their constituents wanted to get done. And so that is what my decision was yesterday as the Pro Tem.”

He also said he was taking a lesson with how the gambling issue affected the process in past years.

“I believe that it exhausted everyone last year,” he said. “And the time and effort that it took to get to that point, and thinking that there was enough folks to go forward, and that was worth the time and effort, and which just took over everything else in the whole Senate at that time, and the State House — not just Senate floor, but also the House of Representatives. And so we ended up being exhausted, and I knew what it takes, because leadership asked me to be in the middle of that last year, and we didn’t need to do that again.”

Gudger went as far as to predict that lawmakers will not revisit the topic in a major way until after the 2026 election cycle in Alabama, which would be when the next quadrennium begins in 2027, and a new class of legislators have taken office.

“So I think it was the right decision to make,” he said. “I think it was the right decision to make for Alabama. And so as we’re looking at this one-pager, that was the full comprehensive package, it just wasn’t the right time to do that. So, I do think you’re not going to see it next year. I think you’ll see it in the first year in the quadrennium, because it’s going to come back at some point.”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee