The state of Alabama will have a Gubernatorial race in November between Senator Tommy Tuberville and former Senator Doug Jones.
Tuberville was a nationally renowned football coach at four universities before running for the Senate in 2020, and defeating Doug Jones.
Jones was a Senator from 2018-2021, after winning a special election after Jeff Sessions became Attorney General for Donald Trump in his first term in 2017. Earlier, he served as US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama under President Bill Clinton, and gained wide notice for the successful prosecution of two Ku Klux Klan members for the 1963 Birmingham Church bombing that killed four African American girls, as well as the indictment of the Olympic Park Bomber, Eric Rudolph, who conducted his terrorist attack in Atlanta in 1996 during that year’s Summer Olympics.
Jones lost his Senate seat in a massive defeat to Tuberville, in a state heavily Republican for decades. But he is back again, trying to win the Governorship, as Tuberville gave up the chance to run for reelection to the Senate, and instead work to become the state’s governor.
Tuberville has gained an horrendous reputation for outrageous statements and actions in his one term in the Senate, and displays the worst elements imaginable in any Senator, making him close to the worst member of the Republican Party in the upper chamber, but he has the full support of Donald Trump.
Jones, who came across as quite decent in his three years in the Senate, and with his impressive earlier public career, is making the attempt to help the Democratic Party to regain the executive branch in Alabama.
He is making a key issue of the growing AI Data Centers, wanting a moratorium on their development as research is being conducted on the problems and dangers of AI Data Centers, which are mostly ending up in rural areas nationally, and affecting the power, water, and air of the areas around them.
Meanwhile, Tuberville has demonstrated no desire to promote regulation or controls of AI Data Centers, so this is becoming a major difference in the race, with the hope that Jones can exploit the issue and win the Governorship.
It would be a step forward if Doug Jones, a decent and principled man, were able to defeat the reckless Tommy Tuberville, and retire him from public life.