Mobile, Ala. — As if Alabama didn’t experience enough political follies in 2017, the Luv Guv and the (allegedly) child-groping Ten Commandments judge may be back in the show again, this time joined by fizzled football coach Tommy Tuberville.
The state’s major newspapers were reporting on Tuesday that Robert Bentley, who resigned as governor in 2017 following a multi-pronged scandal that began as an illicit sexual affair, said he may run for the Senate in 2020. “If the opportunity arises and things work the way they should,” he said, “then we may consider it.”
It was Bentley’s forced resignation, followed by the suspicious appointment of then-state Attorney General Luther Strange to the Senate seat vacated by then-new U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, that opened to door to a special election featuring twice-evicted state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore as the Republican nominee. Moore, of course, lost in this heavily Republican state to previously-little-known Democrat Doug Jones after Moore was accused by multiple women of improperly pursuing them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s or 40s.
Moore, meanwhile, is expected to announce his entrance into the race in May. Always marching to his own drummer, he appears to believe word on the street that many Alabamans increasingly disbelieve those allegations. “If the media lied about Judge Brett Kavanaugh,” goes the refrain, “they probably lied about Judge Moore, too.”
Outsiders might not understand Moore’s continuing hold on some half of Republican voters. A folk hero for repeatedly defying Supreme Court orders purportedly banning God and morality from public life, Moore is seen by many as a martyr for faith and decency. Since it was the “liberal Washington Post” that first broke the reports about Moore’s alleged interest in teenage girls, they suspect the stories are all “lies and slander.”
Tuberville, meanwhile, is a congenial former Auburn University head football coach who tells great, homey stories. He entered the race in early April. He talks like a standard-order, folksy conservative, and was leading the field in at least one poll despite having no political record or even much history of civic engagement. His habit as a head football coach at four colleges was to win plenty of games early in his tenure, only to see his success fade noticeably in later years.
Rep. Bradley Byrne, an accomplished state and federal legislator and education-policy reformer, is the only conventional politician in the race. He announced his candidacy in February, 21 full months before the 2020 general election. One might think that state Republican voters would feel a need to rally behind a serious, demonstrably conservative candidate in order to take the Senate seat back from the pro-abortion-“rights,” pro-gun-restrictions, pro-Obamacare Jones. But maybe not. National right-wing groups have bizarrely tried to paint Byrne as an anti-Trump establishmentarian, even though the Trump administration chose Byrne to author its key education-scholarship bill.
Jones must be loving this Republican circus. Even as a liberal Democrat in the conservative, most pro-Trump state in the union, he probably thinks he can defeat Moore, if Moore is the nominee, just like he did last time. And as veteran state politicos have noted in private conversations, if Moore fails to win the nomination, then it is likely a significant percentage of his fervent followers, angry at whoever “took” the nomination from their man, will leave the Senate general-election ballot line blank.
A Trump endorsement of Byrne might help end the nonsense. Unless that happens, though, the Republican 2020 Senate primary could be another cringe-inducing donnybrook.
