Category: News

This article continues an ongoing series of articles where BamaPolitics.com will ask questions of the candidates running for federal office in 2020. These articles are designed to give our readers an introduction to each candidate and give you a better understanding of why they are running.  We also wanted to ask questions that are not a part of their regular stump speech or talking points. Let us know what you think and let us know if there are questions you have you would like to see answered by reaching out on our BamaPolitics social media or my personal Twitter account @dpreston2020.

Tommy Tuberville was born and raised in Camden, Arkansas. After he graduated from Southern Arkansas University with a degree in Physical Education, Tuberville started his coaching career in the high school ranks. After being a high school head football coach, he moved on to work his way up through the assistant coaching ranks at Arkansas State, Miami, and Texas A&M. After winning three national championships as an assistant at Miami and serving under legendary Texas A&M coach R.C. Slocum, he started his collegiate head football coaching career at Ole Miss. After taking the Head Football Coach position at Auburn University in 1999, he led the Tigers to an undefeated season and an SEC championship in 2004 before leading them on to six straight wins over the University of Alabama Crimson Tide. This Senate run is Tuberville’s first run for political office, and he is running in the Republican primary to try and unseat Doug Jones. I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Coach Tuberville and ask him five questions. These are his answers.

What experiences as a collegiate head football coach do you have that qualifies you to be a United States Senator?

Well, there’s a lot of them. There’s really a lot of carryover because you deal with people number one. I dealt with people for forty years. Rich, middle class, poor, I dealt with them. Mental health issues, drug issues, traveled in every state… but really, I’ve been in the schools. You really learn a lot about our educational system when you go into the buildings and visit with counselors, teachers, and administrators. Then the other part is leadership. I’ve studied the Congress, House, and the Senate and you have to be a leader but also people have to trust you. You’ve got to sell yourself. No different than in college recruiting. You have to sell yourself first. They have to trust you. They have to believe in you, that whatever you say is the word. You have to bring people together. That’s huge. Especially in this day and time. You have to be able to work with people on both sides. You have to be able to communicate. I think communication skills are things of the past because of telephones and internet. Nobody talks anymore. Everything’s through written message or texting or email. I think direct communication, being able to carry on a conversation with people is so, so important if you’re a Senator.

What is the one issue or piece of legislation that is going to be the top priority for you that you will either introduce, sponsor, or co-sponsor to help solve that issue?

Well the biggest thing that we have right now, and it’s created so many problems in this country, is our immigration policy. It’s draining our funds. The American taxpayer in this country is sending trillions of dollars to Washington and a lot of it is going to pay for people over here that shouldn’t be here. So I’m with President Trump 100%. I’ve been to the border a dozen times. I worked in Texas. I’ve got friends of mine that worked down there. We’ve got a mess. You can’t have a country unless you know who’s in your country. We sat around and watched years and years of people coming here and not protecting our borders. Now we need people to come. We need true Americans. But we’ve probably got 20 to 30 million people in this country who, number one, they live in the shadows. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know where they’re from. They don’t pay taxes, but somehow some way they get a check. They get healthcare. There are so many things in this country we need to take up first. Our vets, our elderly, our mental health, our drug addiction. There are so many things we could be spending that money on to solve problems, but we’re trying to take care of those people. I’m not against immigrants. We’re all immigrants. We need them to come in here, but we need to know who’s here. We need to put the wall up, redo our immigration policy, and get back to taking care of the people in this country who pay the taxes.

As the cost of college tuition continues to go up, the choice for many families and many high school graduates is either forgo a 4-year college degree or take on huge amounts of student loan debt. What ideas or solutions can you bring to the national discussion about student loan debt to help make it more manageable and reduce the overall burden on young people starting out in life?

Well, I’ve worked in education all my life. I’ve seen the rapid growth of college tuition all over the country. It’s out of control. I’ve got one in school right now at Auburn, and I don’t know how people pay for it. It’s absolutely amazing, the cost of education. Especially higher education. That needs to be addressed. I would say that just looking at it probably 50% of the kids that go to college need to go somewhere else to learn a skill. It’s become a social thing to go to college. There’s a lot of things to learn from a college experience, but our colleges have outpriced our families. To get into $100k, $200k debt by going to college and then getting out and not being able to pay that debt off because you can’t get a job that pays enough through the degree that you got, it just gets people in the hole. I’d like to see people rethink going to college. Again, there’s a lot of degrees we need people to go to get an education in. A college education. Medicine, lawyers, engineers, architects. But there’s some that need to go into different situations to be able to get a job, to learn to use their hands. Whether it’s technology or to use their brain to be able to go out and get a job. Instead of going to a four-year school and then have to go out and train to get a job in some other field that they got a degree in that they can’t get a job in. It’s a tough situation right now when tuitions are going out of sight. Our country’s carrying a $1.5 trillion debt around with kids that have gone to school, but they get out and they can’t pay that debt back because they can’t make enough money to live on and also pay the debt down. We’ve dug ourselves a hole and it’s just one of many things that our government has gotten into that they should never have gotten into loaning people money to go to college. I mean it should have been from banks, it should have been from the universities. Make the universities be responsible for collecting that money, not the American taxpayer. It’s just another situation in this country where we put the burden on the American taxpayer and not the people who are truly responsible for it.

You had said that you have spent the last year traveling around the state listening to the concerns of the citizens. What specific issues have the voters of the state told you they want you to work on and what are the solutions they would like to see?

Well, there’s a lot of things. They want more jobs. They want better jobs. They want better schools. Obviously, want better roads. There’s a lot of those things, but the number one thing that I hear is healthcare. In this state, the majority of the state is rural areas. And we’re losing our rural hospitals because they just can’t afford to stay open because of Obamacare’s run out the insurance companies. We don’t have enough competition with insurance companies to be able to pay the doctors and the light bill and all the bills that these rural hospitals have. Plus you need good internet in the rural areas to run these hospitals. We don’t have good internet in rural areas. We’re starting to get that, but it’s just one thing after another with our hospitals in rural areas that they can’t keep their doors open because they can’t pay their bills. But it’s not all rural. It’s also in urban areas, too. They’re getting overwhelmed because of the people… they don’t have enough beds, don’t have enough doctors, don’t have enough nurses. Not enough people trained in the medical field because the money’s not there that it used to be, because insurance companies are not paying near as much to the doctors and the drug prices are out of sight. If there’s anything that we really need to address not just for Alabama but for all the states across the country, we’ve got to get a handle on healthcare and drug prices. This is a federal issue, it’s not a state issue. It’s got to be handled in Washington, DC. For some reason everything in Washington, DC runs at a snail’s pace, but we’ve got to get control of healthcare because it’s way overpriced, it’s way too costly. A lot of people need better and better healthcare every day, every week, every month, and every year.

What lessons and experiences do you have working with young people that he can apply to make you a better Senator for the state of Alabama?

I think that this is a good experience point for me. I’ve dealt with all these millennials for the last 15, 20 years that were going through college. They’ve grown up different than most of us. They’ve grown up with technology, they’ve grown up with a different world around them. This millennial group is a great group of young people coming up. This is going to be their country in just a few years. I think in a lot of areas they get a bad rap. They don’t communicate, they don’t have the work ethic… They really do. It’s just different. You see a lot of them. For unfortunate reasons, I think a lot of them have become very close to thinking that socialism is the thing that we need in this country because they’ve been brainwashed in a lot of our schools. We can blame that on our education. There’s a lot of good kids out there that really still believe in this country. They do have work ethic. They want to be the leaders of this country. We’ve just got to find those that can bring the other ones along to continue to make this country great. We’re in a tough situation right now because there’s a huge division between our millennials of what direction they want to take this country. Hopefully, they wake up in time to go along with the ones who really believe in capitalism and not socialism.

ELBA, Ala. (WDHN) — The Elba Chamber of Commerce held its annual awards banquet at the National Security Conference Center.

The banquet was 25$ a person and included a reception along with a delicious dinner. Guess speaker and U.S Senate Candidate Tommy Tuberville was in attendance.

Tuberville used his time to talk to the community about variety of things from sports to politics.

“I do one of these about 3 or 4 nights a week, enjoy getting around the state, and again just being around people that have small businesses. Small businesses have been struggling a little bit, but they are back on their feet now and doing good,” Tuberville said.

On the political side of things, Tuberville says the primaries are the first week in March and they are leading in every poll that has come out.

To read the article originally published by Dothan First, click here.

For Immediate Release:
September 5, 2019

Coach Tuberville Signs Term Limits Pledge

Auburn – “It’s long past time that Congress pass term limits. Restricting the number of years individuals can serve in the House and Senate is the only way we’re ever going to drain the swamp in Washington,” said Tommy Tuberville

Coach Tuberville recently signed the pledge to support term limits. Coach believes it’s vital to the health of our republic to limit how long politicians can stay in Washington. The system our Founders setup was never designed for people to make a career out of living off the public’s dime.

“Go to Washington get work done, and then go back home” said Coach Tuberville.

“I signed the term limits pledge this week because it is what I believe we need. We shouldn’t be sending people to Washington for them to make a career out of it. Its common sense. Some of these people have never held a real job,” Tuberville went on to say.

For Immediate Release:
August 22, 2019

Coach Tuberville Announces a New Wave of County Coordinators
Campaign momentum builds as Statewide Grassroots Leaders Come on Board

Auburn – Coach Tuberville understands the importance of an energized state-wide grassroots effort to take this Senate seat back from socialist Doug Jones.

“I am proud to announce these recent county coordinator additions,” said Tuberville. “Our growing team of county coordinators represents the best of Alabama. We are building an army of volunteers to take our Conservative message across the state,” Tuberville went on to say.

Morgan– Joe Bailey
Etowah– Don Wilson
Calhoun– Patty Hobbs
Houston– John Ferguson
Lee– Zach Bowman
Blount– David Cardwell
DeKalb– Rodney Williams
Colbert– Lori Johnson
Jackson– Dylan Smith
Chilton– Terry Connell
Tallapoosa– Denise Bates and Tyler Gardner
Lawrence– Joe and Lynn Potter
Randolph– Lee Anne Key
Coosa– Nicole Law

Yellowhammer News has obtained a new internal polling memo from Tommy Tuberville’s U.S. Senate campaign that shows the former Auburn University head football coach gaining 10% since June and stretching his lead well into double digits.

The memo summarizes the results of a survey conducted by Moore Information Group, a well-respected national polling firm, from August 11-13. 400 likely 2020 Republican primary voters in Alabama made up the sampling of respondents. The poll’s margin of error was 5%.

The polling memo details, “The data have been weighted to reflect expected turnout demographics for the 2020 primary election.”

“Tuberville leads all candidates with 33%, with support for both Congressman Bradley Byrne (17%) and former Chief Justice Roy Moore (15%) in the mid-teens,” the memo states.

According to the survey, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, at 13%, barely trailed Moore.

State Rep. Arnold Mooney (R-Indian Springs) came in at 1%.

Tuberville, at 23%, was leading the field in his internal poll conducted by the same firm in June. That month’s results showed Moore in second at 18%, followed by Byrne (16%), Merrill (8%) and Mooney (2%). Moore and Merrill had not yet officially announced their bids at that time.

One interesting nugget emphasized in the memo is that the August survey asked respondents whether they were fans of Auburn’s or the University of Alabama’s football programs.

Some have predicted that Tuberville’s Auburn past, given the intense rivalry between the programs, could hurt his statewide campaign.

However, he was the number-one choice of Tide fans in this latest poll, gaining 33% of their vote. Moore (17%) was the next most popular candidate with Bama enthusiasts.

Then, among Auburn fans, Tuberville did have a marked increase over his overall ballot number. Among those who cheer on the Tigers, 43% said they would vote for him, with Merrill (18%) the next highest in that demographic.

The memo also revealed some geographical differences, including the obvious reality that Byrne is leading in the district he represents in Congress, AL-01. Tuberville led all other congressional districts, besides AL-02, where he was tied with Moore.

At 38%, Tuberville performed best out of all candidates with those respondents identifying immigration as their top priority.

A look at name identification and favorability numbers also looked encouraging to Tuberville’s campaign.

While 97% of respondents had heard of Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice’s numbers are still under water — and not appearing to improve. 31% view Moore favorably, while 56% view him unfavorably.

Tuberville had the next highest name identification level by a wide margin at 87%. An impressive 54% of respondents viewed him favorably, compared to 12% unfavorably.

Byrne and Merrill’s numbers in this regard were very similar.

Byrne had 56% name identification, with 31% viewing him favorably and 7% unfavorably.

Merrill had 54% name identification, with 29% viewing him favorably and 5% unfavorably.

In a hotly contested race like this, it can also be important to see which candidates are popular with the supporters of another candidate. As the primary gets closer, some voters may choose to go with their “second choice” if he or she believes that candidate has a better chance of winning — or if their primary choice disappoints them.

Testing a second choice ballot, Tuberville (23%) led in this category, too, followed by Byrne (17%), Merrill (16%), Moore (11%) and Mooney (3%).

In a statement, Erik Iverson, president and managing partner of Moore Information Group, said, “Coach Tuberville has seized the momentum and stretched his lead to double digits in a crowded primary, and that’s no small feat.”

“Alabama Republican primary voters are backing Coach, a political outsider who’s been a staunch supporter of President Trump from the beginning, over the politicians running against him. Doug Jones should be very nervous,” he concluded.

You can view the full polling memo here.

You can read the article originally published by Yellowhammer here.

While illegal immigration dominates the political discussion in America, there is also another aspect of immigration policy: legal immigration.

Recent statistics show the United States allows just over a million legal immigrants in the country annually. Given the obstacles to wage growth in the United States, some have suggested rethinking legal immigration to slow the growth of the labor supply and raise demand, which could result in higher wages.

Throughout the early going of his campaign, former Auburn head football coach Tommy Tuberville, a candidate for U.S. Senate, has emphasized his hawkish stance on illegal immigrants. During an appearance on Huntsville radio’s WVNN on Friday, he reiterated that position.

“Right now, we have a huge influx coming from Africa, the Middle East,” Tuberville said on “The Jeff Poor Show.” “It has kind of slowed down in terms of the people coming from South America. But it doesn’t make any difference. We can’t afford – they’re coming across, and I know they need help. But people in this country need help, too. And we’ve got to get the wall built. We’ve got to know who is here. Then we’ve got to let them come a little at a time because we do need workers and we need people here to make this country better. We just can’t handle all of them at one time.”

When asked, Tuberville acknowledged immigration has an impact on wage growth.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about that,” he replied. “The problem is we’re getting to a point where we don’t need just workers. We need smarter workers – people that can come here that have skills.”

The former football coach boasted about the efforts of the local governments around Alabama to improve their workforces. He said for some it would be a better path to a successful career than attending a four-year college, which may result in college loan debt.

However, he also said policymakers should back off the amount of legal immigration allowed in the country and focus on limiting illegal immigration.

“I think we should back off of it right now,” Tuberville said. “I think that we got to get a handle on who is coming here, where they’re at – I mean, we can control and actually take care of. The problem is, we have people all over this country that we can take care of – they’re elderly or handicap or vets, people that really need help. And we’re broke. This country is absolutely broke, but we’re spending billions of dollars on people coming here. Again, we don’t know really who they are. They’re bringing all kinds of diseases with them that we don’t understand. They’re not educated. We want to help them, but we also want to be able to help the people that have paid taxes in the past have helped this country, but we need immigrants here.”

“You know, we’re all immigrants but we’ve just got to get a handle on it and I would like to see us slow it all down – bring it to a point where we can control it, get all this stuff under control, get our education system under control because I’ve talked to people in this state, superintendents that have said, ‘Hey listen: They are dropping off these young kids here that are here illegally, and they want us to educate them, and they can’t read or write. They can’t speak English. They’ve never been to school. What are we supposed to do? We’re supposed to educate our people, and we’re downgrading our ability to educate the people that have paid their way here. But now all of a sudden, we’re told you’ve got to address this problem and help these kids.’ They do need help, and I feel sorry for them, but we can’t bring our country to a point where we’re hurting ourselves,” he added.

Read the original article published by the Yellowhammer here.