Incumbent Republican Senator Richard Shelby won re-election to a fifth term.

He was easily re-elected in 1992 even as Bill Clinton lost Alabama's electoral votes.

He won his first full term as a Republican in 1998 by a large margin, and faced no significant opposition in 2004.

[1] Shelby, who switched from Democrat to Republican in the mid-1990s, was a popular senator in Alabama for three decades, first elected in 1986.

Recently, he became even more popular in his opposition to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, as the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee.