Care to explain the inside baseball?
Politics at the University of Alabama are controlled by a group of fraternities and sororities whose political wing is called Theta Nu Epsilon (an offshoot of Skull and Bones) but known colloquially as “the Machine”. Merrill received the Machine endorsement when he ran for SGA VP but did not receive it the next year when he ran for Pres. He ran anyway and it was a big scandal within the greek system at UofA.
My post was mostly tongue-in-cheek I have no problem voting for him.