The New York Times electoral map shows how Doug Jones beat Roy Moore in 2017: NYT

WASHINGTON, D.C. — From the beaches of Gulf Shores to Lookout Mountain, Alabama has one more chance to be something and matter in the United States of America in something other than football.

But first the people must reject electing a former football coach with no experience in politics, government and public affairs who has tied his election chances to the anchor of the sinking ship that is the Donald Trump campaign for reelection.

Former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville has no business being elected to any public office, much less the U.S. Senate. There was a time when an ignorant novice like Tuberville would not have been seen as qualified by the dumbest of rednecks to be elected as a county dog catcher, to borrow a euphemism from another time. But in the era of Trump, it may not matter to a majority of Republican voters, who have fallen off the deep end of fake Fox News, where science, facts, education, experience and reality itself have become irrelevant to governing.

While it is becoming painfully clear for them that Trump is going down, statewide polls show Tuberville leading by 8-18 points.

In the big, colorful CNN map, the Cable News Network that gave us the red-blue Republican-Democrat partisan divide map back in the late 1990s, Jones is down by 18 points with no chance to hold the Senate seat he took from Jeff Sessions and former Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore back in the “earthquake” of the 2017 special election.

In another poll conducted by the Auburn University at Montgomery Political Science Department, Jones trails by 12 points. In a Mason-Dixon poll, Tuberville leads by 8. This looks like a landslide in the making. None of these polls are within the margin of error.

But wait. According to the candidate himself, Doug Jones says the only poll that matters is the one people vote in on Election Day.

His campaign, however, at my prompting, just released the results of an internal poll showing him ahead by one point with two weeks to go.

When Tuberville was informed of the poll, he said: “I’m going to cut right to the chase. I’ve never been more concerned about where we stand in this race.”

“We’ve known all along that once Alabama voters saw the truth about Doug Jones’ record of getting things done for them – and saw through Tommy Tuberville’s false ads and complete lack of experience – that Doug Jones could win this race,” the Jones campaign said Monday in another fund raising email message. “We showed the nation that unity and hope could win in 2017. Washington and the pundits counted us out then. They were wrong, and we proved it.”

That’s true. I’m the only journalist and public opinion expert in the country that gave Jones a chance in the summer of 2017. So here’s what it will take this time: a massive voter turnout by women, African Americans, college educated white voters and anti-Trump voters on Nov. 3, and Doug Jones may still have a sliver of a chance.

But that did not stop the fake news Breitbart News of Alabama, Yellowhammer News, from trying to smear Doug Jones recently by claiming he’s not interested in the Senate seat anymore and is being considered for Attorney General in a Biden administration.

“Anti-Trump Democrat Doug Jones has shifted his focus from his re-election to auditioning for an appointment in a potential Biden Administration,” National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesperson Paige Lindgren was quoted as saying. “Jones’ refusal to meet with Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett reflects the fact that he’s no longer interested in representing Alabamians and is more focused on climbing the political ladder instead.”

It’s hard to see a higher rung on the political ladder than United States Senator, but anyway, here at the real news New American Journal, we don’t promote fake news sites like Yellowhammer, so we will not include the link here. If you are interested in that ridiculously false point of view, you can look it up for yourself.

But the fake news report, that should have been banned by Facebook and Twitter, was based on a political insider gossip column of sorts in Washington called Politico Playbook, which actually listed Doug Jones as the ONLY candidate under consideration to replace William Barr as Attorney General once Joe Biden is sworn in as president.

Even before this report came out, after I had seen the CNN map while watching cable news in a motel room in North Carolina, I asked the candidate himself about the possibility of becoming AG in a Biden administration. Predictably, he said he was focused on being reelected as U.S. Senator, something he’s always wanted to be since working for Howell Heflin back in the day.

In his book, Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing that Changed the Course of Civil Rights, however, it is revealed that back in 2017, he was actually considering running for governor, but was talked into running for the Senate seat by friend and campaign finance manager Doug Turner.

So for the sake of argument, let’s say Trump Republicans flood the voting booths on Nov. 3 and give Trump Alabama’s nine electoral votes, and less than 10 percent split their tickets and cross over to vote for Jones, and Tuberville wins. What then?

Could Jones be considered qualified to be Attorney General in a Biden administration? As an attorney, a former U.S. attorney with a significant civil rights record yet with a Joe Biden-style moderate record of non-partisanship, he would probably have no problem sailing through the Senate confirmation process. He claims a long friendship with Biden, and endorsed Biden’s bid for president early on.

When I asked another Alabama attorney about this possibility, Tom Campbell, who also worked for Heflin back in the day, he said he hadn’t considered that.

“Maybe,” he said. “Would love to see that.”

“The establishment will want an Ivy League type,” he said. “But since Biden is not an Ivy-league guy himself maybe he’d go for Doug. He would make a good one. He has the political chops, has experience as a U.S. Attorney, and he is smart. Most of all though, he cares about people and his country.”

There are other lawyers in the U.S. Senate who would also be qualified for the job, including Amy Klobuchar who also ran for president. But she is still valuable to have in the Senate, while Jones would be left without a seat.

Jones won’t directly answer my question about this, but he could use his significant war chest of more than $14 million to launch a run for governor. But if a Democrat can’t hold a U.S. Senate seat, what chance would a Democrat have of retaking the governor’s office away from the Republicans who have held it since 2002?

October Surprise

In a bit of an October surprise, The New York Times recently put out a report on Tuberville’s financial scandals that made it to an investigation by something besides the South Eastern Conference, the Securities and Exchange Commission, under the headline: Tommy Tuberville’s Financial Fumbles.

But the story has not exactly caught on like the sex scandals of Roy Moore, which attracted the attention of every national news organization back in 2017, with reporters and video camera men and women chasing Moore around from church to church all over the state, along with all the late night talk shows, which exploded with jokes after I broke the story that Moore was banned from the Gadsden Mall for chasing underaged girls for sex.

The Final Breach of Judge Roy Moore is At Hand

The Jones campaign has tried to make hay of the report, at least in fund raising.

“We were disgusted by the hypocrisy when Tommy Tuberville said $600/week was ‘way too much’ for those who lost their job due to COVID-19, while he accepted a $5 million dollar buy-out for quitting his Auburn coaching job,” the campaign said in an email blast to supporters.

“Then, we were shocked that while his hedge fund defrauded real people and families of their retirement savings, he had the audacity to call himself the ‘victim.’ Now, we learned that a veterans’ charity he started and ran spent barely any of the money it raised on veterans,” the campaign says.

The review raised questions about Mr. Tuberville’s judgment and financial acumen. While he has said on the campaign trail that he hoped to serve on the ‘banking finance’ committee — the Senate has separate, and prestigious, banking and finance committees — he has at times undercut his own qualifications, the campaign says. In regards to an ill-fated hedge fund venture, he once told a reporter, ‘I’m not smart enough to understand all the numbers’.”

“Tuberville’s cluelessness may seem absurd, but it isn’t a joke,” the campaign says. “If Tommy Tuberville becomes a U.S. Senator, his ignorance becomes dangerous — a real threat to lives and livelihoods. Alabama needs to know the truth – ‘Coach Clueless’ would be a danger to lives and livelihoods across the state and the country.”

If Trump were to win reelection, he’s already attacked the payroll tax and threatened to eliminate it, the tax that directly supports Social Security and Medicare.

Problem: Republicans Outnumber Democrats

The biggest problem Jones faces in trying to remain in the Senate is that there are more registered Republican voters in Alabama than there are registered Democrats, according to the Alabama Secretary of State.

Republican John H. Merrill recently announced that Alabama continues to shatter state voter registration records with more than 3.5 million registered voters.

“Since January 19, 2015, we’ve registered 1,301,012 new voters,” he says on the state website. “We now have a state record 3,500,894 registered voters in Alabama. Those numbers are unprecedented and unparalleled in the history of the state and per capita no state in the Union has done as much as we’ve done in that same period, and I’m very, very proud of that.”

He has also overseen and brags about purging the voting rolls and enforcing the requirement for a state ID to vote, and it could be argued, suppressing the votes of African Americans, other minorities and poor people.

The problem for Jones is that a majority, 52 percent of voters, are solidly or lean Republican, while only 35 percent are solidly or lean Democrat, and 13 percent say they are independent and unaffiliated with either party. So Jones would need to get all the registered Democrats to turn out and vote for him, along with all the independents, and he would still need at least 7-10 percent of Republican voters to split their tickets and vote for a Democrat in the Senate race.

Merrill claims that 96 percent of all eligible African Americans are registered to vote, 91 percent of all eligible Caucasian Alabamians are registered to vote, and 94 percent of all eligible Alabamians are registered to vote.

The question is who will be motivated to turn out and vote in person or by mail?

On November 8, 2016, more than 2.1 million Alabamians voted, breaking every record in the history of the state for participation in a Presidential General Election, Merrill says.

On December 12, 2017, more than 1.3 million Alabamians voted and participated in the special U.S. Senate election.

On November 6, 2018, more than 1.7 million Alabamians voted, again breaking every record in the history of the state for a midterm general election. This was an election that saw record numbers of Democrats elected to Congress in the midterms, giving Democrats the controlling majority in the House.

According to other sources, Alabama’s population is 65.4 percent white (not Hispanic) compared with 60.4 percent nationwide.

People who are 65 or older make up 17 percent of Alabama’s population compared with 16.1 percent nationwide.

The good news for Jones is that voters over 65 are turning against Trump due to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and rudeness in debating Joe Biden in the first presidential debate.

On Nov. 3, everything will depend on how voters respond to Trump in the final two weeks of the campaign.

Will older voters, veterans and others who feel insulted by Trump calling them “losers and suckers” either cross over and vote for Democrats, Joe Biden and Doug Jones? Or could they simply stay at home to avoid the coronavirus and refuse to vote in person?

Far more Democrats are expected to vote by mail than Republicans, mainly due to Trump’s own statements and actions trying to suppress voting by mail. So Democrats will hold the advantage in mail voting, by far.

This may be your last chance to stay in the game, Alabama. How will you vote?