Summary: Republican Congressman Jerry Carl says he knows voters in the Wiregrass area, newly drawn into the congressional district he’s represented since 2021, don’t love the idea of being represented by someone from Mobile.<br> <br> “And I don’t blame them,” Carl said on In the Weeds. “They’re used to having someone from the Wiregrass, in the Wiregrass and they’ve been stripped of that.”<br> <br> <br> <br> In the court-mandated congressional map changes, Carl's District 1 was stretched from the southwest corner of the state across the lower counties to the Georgia line. Similarly, District 2, which formerly included all of the Wiregrass region, now goes west and dips into Mobile.<br> <br> Carl, a former Mobile County Commission member, is losing much of the city of Mobile and Prichard from his district.<br> <br> “It is what it is at the end of the day and we have to work with it,” Carl said. “The people realize that and have been very nice about it.”<br> <br> The change now pits Carl against his GOP colleague and fellow two-term House member, Barry Moore of Enterprise. <br> <br> “Neither one of us are here because we want to be here, running against one another, but (are) because of the redrawing of the map and courts making their changes,” Carl told Alabama Daily News’ Todd Stacy.<br> <br> He said he started campaigning in the Wiregrass about four months ago. <br> <br> “It’s a lot of peanuts, a lot of cotton and a lot of helicopters,” he said about the agriculture and defense priorities of the area. Carl is on the House’s appropriations and natural resources committees.<br> <br> He said he’s been talking about economic development and infrastructure.<br> <br> Carl also said he expects Club for Growth, a Washington-based political group, to attack him again in this race. The group opposed him in 2020 and has previously supported Moore.<br> <br> “Sixty percent of this district, I’ve served for the last four years, three-and-a-half years,” he said. “They know me. I’ll run on my record.”<br> <br> The new district also means new media markets and campaign strategies,<br> <br> We’ve got four more months to “do everything we’re supposed to have a year to do,” he said about campaigning. <br> <br> Carl also talked about the new speaker of the House and the three-week ordeal that led to the change.
