Opinion Don't worry about villains, just vote for your best candidate

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I’ve received quite a bit of backlash from my progressive friends over the fact that I was mildly complimentary of—or at least not teeth-gnashingly hostile toward—Tommy Tuberville’s “playbook” for Alabama.

That was Tuberville’s policy manual—the basic outline of what he hopes to do if elected governor on Tuesday—and it wasn’t all that bad. There were quite a few things to like about its focus and the things he identified as Alabama’s most pressing problems. I mean, damn, if a problem is a problem, it’s still a problem when someone you usually disagree with says it is.

We have to get away from this mindset in which people on the other side of the aisle can never have a good idea. Because it’s helping contribute to this ridiculous political climate in which we can no longer simply disagree ideologically with people, but we must also paint them as America-hatin’ supervillains who will destroy us all and ruin our lives.

Now, look, let’s be fair and say that Tuberville has, himself, contributed to that toxic climate with his rhetoric and penchant for saying outlandish and untrue things. But my mama told me that two wrongs don’t make a right. And the right way to combat that toxicity isn’t to join those who are spreading it, but to encourage informed voting and rational conversation.

So, let’s have one here. I’m going to tell you why I will vote for Doug Jones, and I’m not going to bash Tommy Tuberville. I’m not going to tell you that Tuberville is dangerous or stupid or a bad person. Because I don’t believe he’s any of those things.

In my best John McCain: He’s a decent family man, a citizen who I happen to have deep disagreements with on fundamental issues.

Like education, for example. I happen to have an 8-year-old little girl who has me so hopelessly under her thumb that I spent Friday night dressed like some zombie teen from a Disney movie so she could win a prize at her friend’s party. Her future is sorta important to me, and I know that I want for her what most every parent wants for their children: a good education and a chance to succeed at a safe, well-rounded school.

We have that where we live, and Tuberville, like most Republicans in this state, is a threat to it, I believe, with their support of the CHOOSE Act. Because the CHOOSE Act is a scam. It might help a handful of kids—a tiny percentage of Alabama’s overall school-age population—but it harms far, far more by stripping away necessary funding and refusing to provide a true “choice” to kids who are trapped in struggling schools.

I can recount a thousand ways that the act is meant only to be a huge tax break to wealthy families and show you on paper the students it harms while it supports fly-by-night private schools that do a far worse job than the local public schools. It is a joke, and how so many people have been conned into this charade remains a mystery to me.

If Jones said nothing more to me than that he’d fight the CHOOSE Act, that would be enough. But there’s also health care.

I hate to lay the sins of a party at the feet of any one individual candidate, but when it comes to health care, specifically in Alabama, I must. Because the Republicans who have run Alabama the past two decades have failed time and time again to address the dismal, criminal health care system that serves this state. That starts with refusing, for purely political reasons, to expand Medicaid under Obamacare. We’d be living in an entirely different health care world right now had they done that simple thing.

But perhaps even worse than failing to expand Medicaid was never—not one single time—coming up with a solution to fix Alabama’s many, many health care problems. They’ve known that the rural hospitals were closing. They knew the labor and delivery units were shutting down everywhere. They knew about the large ambulance deserts. They knew that hundreds of thousands of Alabamians were in a coverage gap and dying because of it.

They did nothing. Not a damn thing.

Not one single proposal in all this time. And even as Alabamians see their health insurance premiums shoot through the roof, thanks entirely to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, they have nothing but shrugs and transgender boogeymen to offer up.

I’m sorry, but I can’t trust another Republican to fix it. Not without a detailed, specific plan. Tuberville’s “playbook” says some hopeful things about fixing the health care system in Alabama, but there’s no detailed plan to do it.

Jones does have a plan, and it starts with expanding Medicaid. Those federal dollars would help immediately with funding for both rural hospitals and mental health care. It’s not a cure for every ill, and I’d like to have a better plan for paying for the expansion than what Jones has provided, but his plan is no more vague or expensive than Tuberville’s.

Finally, there is rhetoric.

Alabama has a lot of good people in it. People of all races, religions, sexual orientations and college football fandoms. I am tired of having entire political campaigns built around the attack of our people. I am tired of glossing over the poverty, the poorly run government agencies, the struggling schools, the increasing homeless population (especially military veterans), the mental health crisis and the proliferation of illegal weapons on our streets and instead pretending that there’s a chance one of us might encounter in our lifetimes a boy playing in a girls’ sporting event.

It is insulting to the intelligence of frogs, much less functioning adults. And it is, at its core, basic schoolyard cruelty designed to make scapegoats of the helpless.

In every conversation I’ve ever had with Jones about the issue (and in the comments I’ve read or heard from him about it), the message has remained consistent: We’re going to treat everyone with dignity and respect, and we’re going to take the same common-sense approach to this that we always have in Alabama.

That’s all I want. Stop trying to get me to hate my neighbor and just fix the real problems.

So, those are my reasons. It’s fine if they’re not your reasons. It’s fine if you disagree with me on my reasons, or on anything else. And it’s even fine if you think Tuberville is the better choice for you.

I simply want you to do what I did: Consider the issues that are most important to you—and try to stick to things the officeholder in question can actually control—and then support the candidate whose policies most closely align with what you want for yourself and your family.

If you do that, I think we’ll all be just fine.