This is an opinion column.

Surprise!

There were no surprises. Not in Alabama. Not statewide. Alabama’s Republican leadership held on to power with a kung fu grip. Democrats couldn’t gain an inch, much less a yard.

Like LSU. It wasn’t close.

Republicans elected, as it turned out, to kick ass.

Gov. Kay Ivey trounced Democrat Walt Maddox – no debate about it. She led by about the same margin Robert Bentley beat Parker Griffith in 2014, and that was considered a shellacking.

And Maddox, well, he actually ran a campaign.

This wasn’t a blue wave. It wasn’t a blue ripple. It was a just a wish. Despite social media fervor. Despite the resistance and serious challengers in all the major offices for the first time in a long time.

It was a bludgeoning. Will Ainsworth beat Will Boyd in a battle of Wills to become lieutenant governor, first in line to the gubernatorial throne. Attorney General Steve Marshall put Joe Siegelman away without drama. John Merrill stayed secretary of state. Jim Zeigler remains auditor.

And all the numbers – most of the numbers – look strikingly similar to those from 2016. Alabama is a bright red one-party state, except in pockets like Jefferson County and the sparsely populated Black Belt.

Not a blue wave. A red tide.

The race most observers expected to be closest – not close, but closest – was that for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court between Republican Tom Parker and Democrat Bob Vance. Parker was at last look leading by a margin that sounded like an Alabama/Arkansas football score.

And that’s about as close as you get in statewide races.

It was a beatdown. Like 2016. Or 2014. Or 2012. Or 2010.

The only difference was the Democratic candidates themselves. They were able, and believable, and for the most part campaigned hard. If you looked at them individually you might, if you didn’t know this place, think they had a chance.

But Alabama is red. And Alabama supports the president like no other state. And resistance is a dirty word in the state that dares defend its rights.

Yet that’s not the whole reason the Democratic resistance was futile in Alabama. It’s that Democrats in Alabama face all that and their own inept, corrupt, corrosive party structure.

Let’s face it, the Alabama Democratic party is divided by power and purpose and race. Which is ironic, given what the Democratic Party nationally is supposed to stand for.

Joe Reed and Nancy Worley hold on to party power in the state and demand fealty and cash in return for organizational and get-out-the-vote support.

They’d rather run a failing party than share influence in a competitive one. Call it what it is. The Alabama Democratic Party is the best thing to happen to Republicans since Bill Baxley and Charlie Graddick melted down in 1986.

This party is not about ideology, or change, or resistance, or any of the things Democrats across the country would claim.

What was it Will Rogers said? “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

And he couldn’t even imagine Alabama’s incompetence. He never met Joe Reed or Nancy Worley.

The Alabama party has no social media to offer candidates, no common goals or common ground. It provides them only demands and threats and barriers. In doing so, it merely reinforces every negative thing Republicans think about their Democratic counterparts.

Surprise! It ain’t.

Alabama would be better off with a two-party system. But it can’t have one. Because its Democrats stand in the way.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.