Egg on my face. It was the ‘wp edit’ plugin doing it. God. When I disable that plugin and only use the functions.php to disable wpautop(), it works correctly when saving draft. The visual editor displays it with an added <p> tag, but it doesn’t have it when published. Definitely the lesser of the two evils. Any ideas as to why it would still add a <p> tag in the visual editor when i have this added to my functions.php file?
remove_filter( 'the_content', 'wpautop' );
remove_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'wpautop' );
