AL-Sen: On Tuesday, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions lost the ugly Republican primary runoff for his old Senate seat to Donald Trump’s endorsed candidate, former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville. With 550,000 votes counted, Tuberville leads Sessions by a wide 61-39 margin. Tuberville will take on Sen. Doug Jones, who is the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate simply by virtue of his state’s deep red hue.
Both parties have released polls in recent weeks showing Jones behind Tuberville, though each side very much disagrees on how competitive this race is. The far-right Club for Growth, which aired ads for Tuberville in the runoff, unveiled a survey from WPA Intelligence on Monday that found Tuberville beating the incumbent 50-40. Still, the Club isn’t acting like this race is a done deal, and Politico recently reported that it had booked $1.3 million for an ad buy that began the day after the runoff.
WPA’s results are similar to a late June survey from the GOP firm Cygnal, which showed Tuberville ahead 50-36; Cygnal said that this survey was not conducted for anyone. However, the Democratic pollster ALG Research, working on behalf of a private client, also released numbers around that same time giving Tuberville just a 47-44 edge over Jones. The one nonpartisan pollster that has released numbers here in months was Auburn University at Montgomery, which recently found Tuberville ahead 44-36. Daily Kos Elections rates this contest as Likely Republican.
No matter how the Jones-Tuberville race turns out in November, though, Tuesday’s Republican runoff results were one final humiliation for Sessions at the hands of Trump, his one-time ally. Four years ago, Sessions stood out as the first senator to back Trump during the presidential primary, and Trump rewarded him after the election by naming him U.S. attorney general.
However, their relationship quickly collapsed after Sessions recused himself from the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and Sessions spent the rest of his tenure on the receiving end of a non-stop Twitter hate barrage from Trump. Sessions was forced to resign in 2018, a move that, as Jason Zengerle would write in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year, left him “by some accounts, a broken man.”
In November of 2019, exactly one year after his sacking, Sessions announced that he would run to reclaim the Senate seat he’d held for 20 years from Jones, who had flipped it in a 2017 special election against scandal-plagued Republican Roy Moore. Sessions' allies, including Sen. Richard Shelby, tried to convince Trump to at least stay neutral in the primary, and for months, they succeeded. Trump refrained from saying anything about Sessions, who even ran ads that highlighted their once close relationship and avoided mentioning their subsequent falling out.
Tuberville led Sessions by a narrow 33-32 in the first round of voting back in March, which was well short of the majority either of them needed to avoid a runoff. Everything started to unravel for Sessions the next day, though, when Trump resumed trashing him on Twitter; Trump endorsed Tuberville the following week. Alabama soon changed the date of the primary runoff from March 31 to July 14 because of the coronavirus pandemic, which may have hurt Sessions further by giving Trump several extra months to attack him—time Trump would very much make use of.
Tuberville and the Club piled on, with the former coach memorably running a commercial arguing that Sessions “wasn’t man enough to stand with President Trump when things got tough.” Sessions fought back by depicting Tuberville, who had left Alabama following his 2008 resignation as Auburn coach after a bad season, as an outsider. This contest was especially nasty, and The New York Times wrote Tuesday that there hadn’t been a single positive ad since February. Ultimately, though, Sessions ended Tuesday with his first electoral defeat in his more than two decades in state politics.