Tommy Tuberville

This is an opinion cartoon.

Tommy Tuberville has spent much of his political career paddling through a narrow channel of grievances, insults and culture-war outrage. Democrats are the enemy. Immigrants are the problem. Gay people don’t deserve the right to celebrate. Islamists are “here to kill us.“ Every day brings a new villain. Every speech he spits out is a bitter word salad.

Ol’ Tubs consistently brings his goober ‘A’ game to the black hole of fear politics. That’s where he lives. In a straitjacket of his own making, sitting in a frowny-faced inner tube, drifting down the bleak, murky waters of the “Strait of Hate.”

If we climb in that inner tube with him as governor, Alabama will be in dire straits.

Kyle Whitmire asks the quiestion:

“If Tommy Tuberville moved back to Alabama in August of 2018, why did he vote in Florida three months later?”

Excerpts from his column:

For years, Tuberville has struggled to convince everybody he was a bona fide Alabama “resident citizen.” Alabama law requires candidates for governor to have lived in the state for the last seven years.

The evidence didn’t seem to be on his side.

In Florida, he had a 4,000-square-foot beach house on the Gulf Coast, worth at least $4 million, which he has owned for nearly 20 years.

By 2023, Tuberville had sold his Alabama property.

In 2017, his wife and son bought a three-bedroom, one-bathroom Auburn house. The property has been appraised at about $300,000, less than a tenth of what the Florida beach house is worth. But this is what Tuberville said was his residence.

As a U.S. senator, Tuberville has used campaign funds and taxpayer dollars to fly to Florida often — to dine in its restaurants and to travel by car. As much as, if not more than, he does such things in Alabama.

In 2017, he filmed a promo for ESPN saying he had moved to Florida after he retired from coaching and called it “a great place to live.”

Recently, at an induction into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, Tuberville said he goes back to Auburn for three or four ball games a year, before he seemed to catch himself, saying “actually” he lived in Auburn, when not working in Washington, D.C.

Stack all the evidence in a pile and it seemed to point in one direction — toward the Gulf Coast.

But there was one thing that might give a more definitive answer — where he paid his state income taxes.