The state of Alabama has been the epicenter of our political theater in recent weeks.
Stories about Republican candidate Roy Moore made national headlines and became late-night punchlines.
It was so bad that the politically unthinkable happened: The Republican lost in the most red state in the country.
Moore was edged out at the wire by Doug Jones, a very liberal Democrat. It’s just the latest example of voters being forced to choose between the lesser of two evils (if even one-tenth of the allegations against Moore are true, then the much greater evil was defeated).
Jay GreesonBut as pundits trying to decipher what this means for next year and beyond, consider something bigger could be at play.
For those paying attention, the simple truth could be that the most powerful person in the state of Alabama decided this election.
No, not Moore, the former state supreme court judge, or even Jones. Not Kay Ivey, who is the current governor of the state because Robert Bentley was forced to resign in scandal.
Nope, the numbers show that University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban most likely finished third and was on a large number of the write-in votes cast.
That number of write-in selections – more than 22,000, mind you – was more than enough to swing an election in which neither candidate got a majority of the more than 1.2 million votes cast.
This is nothing new for Saban. He was picked on hundreds of ballots in the state in a previous presidential election.
Here’s betting that Saban would be pretty doggone good at whatever he decided to put his famous process behind.
Saban assuredly could win almost any election in the state of Alabama, considering that Alabama fans love him and Auburn fans would be tickled for him to have any job other than the one he now holds.
(Still, Saban, who makes roughly $10 million a year as the best college football coach in the country, certainly would not want to take that type of pay cut to swap jobs with Jones. A U.S. senator makes $174,000 a year. That’s a nice check that works out to roughly $14,500 a month. At his $10 million salary, Saban makes more than $27,000 a day, folks. A day.)
Man, whether he’s trying to or not, Saban is righting a whole lot of wrongs and ending the careers of folks who have no business being employed with taxpayer funds. He drop-kicked the University of Tennessee program so hard a couple of months ago, he helped walked that gasbag Butch Jones out the door, too.
Since the divide between Doug Jones and Moore was so close – Jones had a smidge more than 671,000 votes; Moore got almost 651,000 – the state will count the names on the write-ins since the outcome was closer than the 22,819 write-ins.
Saban was pegged as the name most often mentioned among those write-ins, and that number – again, this is the ultimate testament to the lack of viable options on the ballot – could have made Moore the winner.
In fact, a Democrat group encouraged Alabama voters to pick Saban in the days before Tuesday’s actual voting. MSNBC even interviewed a self-described lifelong Republican voter who wrote-in Saban rather than voting for Moore or Jones.
In a race this bizarre that had so many twists and turns, a football coach deciding a U.S. Senate election leaves three words to perfectly describe this entire ordeal.
Only in Alabama.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com and 423-757-6343.