Nick Saban has no apparent reason to run for political office and several reasons not to. But in the next few years, Democrats in Alabama will have no choice but to put relentless pressure on the recently retired University of Alabama football coach to do so. Maybe, they’ll need to hope, he will get bored enough in retirement to consider it, or maybe he can be browbeaten into feeling the insatiable itch of public service.
Over two weeks in late January, pollsters from the market research firm YouGov surveyed 532 registered voters in Alabama and found Saban narrowly leading Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville, himself a former college football coach at Auburn, in a hypothetical matchup for Senate in 2026. The polling group, which shared its data with Slate, found Saban leading with 42 percent of the vote to 39 percent. The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus 4.9 percent, meaning it’s best to think of Saban and Tuberville as tied, the pollster said.Saban’s competitive posture against Tuberville is in stark contrast to how other Democrats fare. Former Sen. Doug Jones trails Tuberville 52 percent t27 percent, a more expansive margin than Tuberville’s 60–40 win over Jones in their 2020 race. (Jones was quite popular in Alabama for a Democrat, but to win his seat, he needed to run against an accused sexual abuser, Roy Moore.) YouGov also polled Tuberville against a “generic Democrat” and found the Republican leading with 49 percent of the projected vote to the generic Dem’s 32 percent. Only Saban was competitive. No candidates have yet announced a run to challenge Tuberville.
“Nick Saban looks like an extremely valuable recruit that Democrats should be considering carefully in this race,” John Ray, the polling director of YouGov Blue, the Democratic political research division that set up the survey, told me. “I base that on the clear signs of his strong personal constituency and on his relatively strong performance compared to others who Democrats might be considering.”
Leave a Reply