It is nearly impossible to not turn into your favorite forehead-slapping meme when discussing the Alabama senate race between Tommy Tuberville and Doug Jones. Any logical analyses of it can cause your brain to liquify and drip out of your nose to find the sweet release of non-existence. On the one side, you have incumbent Jones, who has ably served the state for decades, either in Congress or as a federal prosecutor. As an Alabama U.S. attorney Jones took on the KKK, convicting those responsible for the Klan’s deadly 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church.
On the other side, you have Tuberville, who does manage to stand up without falling over most of the time.
But this being Alabama, and Tuberville being a former coach at Auburn, nothing is ever that simple. Even having some of the more ludicrous thoughts and policies that couldn’t even reach the standard of “backward,” Tuberville had found himself leading in polls heading into the fall.
However, there’s been a shift since October came around, and it could be thanks to ads from the Jones camp which point out that Tuberville’s football record is nothing to tout.
This campaign ad came out on Oct. 1, and yesterday the Tuberville campaign emailed donors saying that they had fallen behind in the polls, after having led by some 12-15 points in August. Yet that plea didn’t stop campaign officials from telling the press that no lead had, in fact, been squandered. Of course, they failed to explain the glaring discrepancy between those two claims. They’re trailing and need money, but also they’re not trailing. Not fishy at all. (An internal poll from the Jones campaign also shows the race getting tighter.)
Jones has a huge financial advantage, receiving far more than Jones from out-of-state donors hoping to flip the senate. A possible reversal of fortunes in the race could also be attributed, in part, to a New York Times and AP report revealing that Tuberville’s charity to benefit veterans had actually spent two-thirds of its proceeds on golf tournaments. Screwing over veterans is the kind of thing most everyone finds distasteful.
Tuberville won the Republican nomination for the race after clocking Jeff Sessions in the primary, which is a sentence and a half, thanks to the fissures between Sessions and President Orangutan and Tuberville’s devoted following of the president. It was thought being closely-linked to the President would see Tuberville glide to victory in the red state, but it could be that Jones pointing out that Tuberville was shitty at his actual job may keep him from the job he isn’t qualified for. Nothing to do with Jones being a faithful public servant for decades, or anything like that.
What a fucking world.