Famed Alabaman Tommy Tuberville has a Florida problem

Poor Tommy Tuberville. All he wants to do is become governor of Alabama and shed his nickname as the dumbest man in the Senate.

But Tuberville seems to have forgotten a key factor in his cunning plan to get a new job: You have to, well, live in Alabama to run for governor of Alabama.

And Tuberville … does not, at least per the lawsuit just filed in Alabama state court.

The problem for Tuberville is Alabama’s pre-residency requirement. States get to impose their own rules for how long you must have lived in the state to run for a state office, and Alabama’s is lengthy: seven years.

So in order to be governor, Tuberville must have resided in Alabama since November 2019. A court challenge like this asks a judge to determine whether Tuberville has been “domiciled” in Alabama for the appropriate amount of time, and this lawsuit has a LOT of allegations that he absolutely hasn’t.

But honestly? We have to start with the best part of the complaint:

In early December of 2016, Tuberville abruptly resigned as the head football coach at the University of Cincinnati when his imminent firing was widely rumored following a disappointing 4-8 record, including five straight losses to end the season.

As many new retirees do, Tuberville promptly moved to Florida.

Ouch. It hurts, because it’s true—both the losing-season part and the move-to-Florida part. Well, sort of. You see, Tuberville and his wife had already owned a 5,000-square-foot place in the Sunshine State since 2004. Yet Tuberville insists that he doesn’t actually live there, but rather in a much more modest 1,500-square-foot home in Auburn, Alabama, and has since 2017.

Sure, except that 2017 purchase was the subject of a previous residency challenge when Tuberville was floating the possibility of running for Alabama governor in 2018. Per the complaint, in 2017, Tuberville registered his gubernatorial campaign with the Alabama Secretary of State using a P.O. box in Auburn, Alabama, as his address.

Of course, a P.O. box doesn’t really prove you live anywhere, but maybe Tuberville didn’t quite grasp that? Two days later, Tuberville’s wife and son purchased the Auburn home. All of this unraveled pretty quickly, and less than two months later, Tuberville dropped his gubernatorial bid, saying, “I think I could’ve gone through legal channels to get the residency issue solved, but my family wasn’t wild about the idea either.”

Rather than, well, moving to Alabama for real, Tuberville and his wife appeared to have fully embraced their new Florida life. Both Tuberville and his wife registered to vote in Florida in 2017, and Tuberville voted there in 2018.

To be fair, those events happened prior to the clock starting on the residency requirement for Tuberville’s latest run, but they are a problem for Tuberville nonetheless. The famed college football coach has vaguely said that he changed his legal residence back to Alabama sometime in 2018 or 2019, but when faced with a question about it on talk radio, said, “I moved back about, I would say, probably, full-time, end of August.” The host pointed out that Tuberville had voted in Florida in November 2018, which … crickets.

So, per the complaint, it looks like Tuberville solved this going forward by being registered to vote in both Alabama and Florida for at least two years, until 2020.

Looks like we found some of the voter fraud Republicans are always banging on about!

In 2019, Tuberville kicked off his attempt to hit the seven-year residency requirement with more shenanigans surrounding the tiny Auburn house and even got himself an Alabama driver’s license. Except he kept his Florida driver’s license until 2023.

It might be Tuberville’s own words that trip him up the most, however. Per the complaint:

In April of 2026, Tuberville admitted to an interviewer at the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame that ‘I go back to Auburn for 3 or 4 ballgames a year.’ When he realized his admission, Tuberville quickly tried to cover it up by adding, “Actually, I live in Auburn.”

There’s so much more like this, both in the complaint and in news coverage in Alabama media outlets, because Tuberville is not smart enough to keep his story straight.

Though this challenge was brought by Alabama veterans who have this silly notion that the state constitution and state laws matter, Tuberville is sure that somehow, this is Doug Jones’ fault, because his Democratic challenger has been overtaken by the “Marxist mind virus.”

Also, he’s totally already beat the charges, come on, per his campaign chair Jordan Doufexis.

“The Alabama Republican Party saw over 100 pages of evidence and unanimously confirmed Coach is qualified. DC Doug can hide in court behind lawyers and lies,” Doufexis said.

What the spokesperson is referencing here is that Tuberville’s residency had already been challenged at the party level in some good old-fashioned internal GOP fighting, and the challenge failed.

So the spokesperson is indeed essentially saying that the court challenge is totally unfair and no biggie, because Republicans who want to elect Tommy Tuberville investigated Tommy Tuberville and found that Tommy Tuberville lives in Alabama. But no one is required to accept this self-interested conclusion as the truth, and Tuberville may have to deal with this all in a court of law instead of the friendly confines of his political party.

Have fun, Coach.

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