Alabama Campaign's Strategy of 'Making Up Endorsements' Backfires
If you're running for mayor of a small Alabama town, the clearest path to victory is simply making up an endorsement from the Alabama football coach. But don't get caught, like Dorothy Davidson's campaign did! That ruins the whole plan.
Dorothy Davidson is running in a tight field for mayor of Bessemer, Alabama, population 28,000. Her campaign recently announced that it had won the endorsement of famous Alabama college football coach Nick Saban, the state's de facto overlord. It spread flyers around town showing Davidson posing with Saban at a golf course, and Davidson was set to win a full 167,000% of the vote.
Unfortunately, Nick Saban never actually endorsed her. He's busy training the football squad for another fall campaign, after all! Davidson's campaign manager, Kevin Morris, just made the whole thing up and started spreading it around. Davidson was (poorly) edited into the golf course photo. (Edited version up top; original below.)
Why did he do this? According to Morris, "I thought, ‘Damn, if we had an endorsement from Nick Saban, I bet it'd help.'" He's not wrong!
Morris' unraveling was slow and painful:
At first, Mr. Morris denied to local reporters that the photograph was a fake. Then, when the original version emerged, Mr. Morris acknowledged using a computer program to create it but insisted that the endorsement itself was genuine. He later confessed that that, too, had been faked.
Well, has anybody even bothered to ask Nick Saban if he does support Dorothy Davidson? Kevin Morris might get lucky! Worth a shot.
