Senate hopeful Tommy Tuberville stresses need to get jobs back: 'We've sold our country out to China'

“We got to get jobs back in the state of Alabama and all over the country,” Tommy Tuberville, a first-time politician and former Auburn University football coach, told “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday.

Tuberville was the winner in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary runoff in Alabama, defeating former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, thanks, in part, to an endorsement from President Trump. The Associated Press projected Tuberville as the winner in the election about 90 minutes after the polls closed in Alabama.

“I'm a huge Donald Trump fan,” Tuberville said on Wednesday.

He called Trump “a quarterback” saying, “He’s in the pocket and has people hanging all over him, but he's still completing passes.”

Tuberville went on to note that “the referendum for Donald Trump last night in Alabama” is that “he is going to take this state overwhelmingly.”

TOMMY TUBERVILLE DEFEATS JEFF SESSIONS IN ALABAMA GOP SENATE PRIMARY RUNOFF

Tuberville said this “country is in trouble” and that is the reason he is running.

“We better get control of this country from Washington, D.C., on down to local government and that's the reason I'm running,” he added.

Sessions – who was fighting for his political life – was also fending off the ire of the president. He served a dozen years as a senator from Alabama before becoming Trump’s first attorney general in 2017, but Sessions angered the president by recusing himself that year from the Russia investigation into the 2016 election.

Tuberville now advances to the November general election to take on Sen. Doug Jones, who is the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate in this year’s general election. The Republicans are looking to hold onto their 53-47 majority in the Senate, and Alabama could prove to be a real shot at flipping a Democrat-held seat.

When asked what is the key issue that drives him in the upcoming election, Tuberville said the need to bring back jobs.

“We've sold our country out to China and foreign countries,” Tuberville said. “We've sent everything out. We don't have the small manufacturing jobs in this country, in the small communities.”

“We got to get those back,” he continued. “We got to give our kids an opportunity to look in a direction of a job and a successful career and raise a family other than look around going what am I going to do? Am I going to get on welfare or am I going to work hard to make ends meet in terms of getting that job and work your way up?”

He went on to say, “There's no possible way right now in some of these smaller areas in Alabama and even across the country to make ends meet with not having the jobs.”

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Fox News reached out to Jones and invited him to speak on “Fox & Friends,” but did not immediately hear back.

Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.