The special election to fill Baldwin County’s vacant state Senate seat briefly promised a genuine Republican brawl in the summer of 2007. It ended with a whimper.
The vacancy
The District 32 seat came open in May when Bradley Byrne accepted Gov. Bob Riley’s appointment as chancellor of Alabama’s two-year college system, a post from which Byrne would go on to run for governor and, later, for Congress. The scramble to succeed him drew a crowded Republican field: Baldwin County Commissioner David Ed Bishop of Fairhope, state school board member Randy McKinney, Eastern Shore businessman Trip Pittman, former state Sen. Albert Lipscomb and party chairman Don McGriff, a former nominee for lieutenant governor.
On the Democratic side, Eastern Shore attorney A.J. Cooper — formerly the mayor of Prichard in Mobile County — qualified for the race. A Republican runoff, if needed, was set for Sept. 11, with the general election Oct. 16.
The loyalty rule
The trouble for Bishop arose from a rule the state Republican Party had recently adopted. Under it, party officials reserved the right to deny ballot access to a candidate who, as a Republican officeholder in a prior election, had publicly participated in another party’s primary or publicly supported another party’s nominee. The rule reached back six years.
The evidence pointed at Bishop came from a campaign finance report filed with the Alabama Secretary of State by Sen. Pat Lindsey, D-Butler, whose District 22 took in part of north Baldwin County. Lindsey’s disclosure recorded a $150 contribution on Jan. 4, 2006, from the Friends of David Ed Bishop Campaign, and a $250 contribution the day before from the Friends of Jody Bishop Campaign. Jody Bishop, a Republican judge in Baldwin County, is the commissioner’s son.
The senator contradicted his own report
In a June 28 letter addressed to whom it may concern, Lindsey refuted his own filing. Bishop, he wrote, did not make a contribution to his re-election campaign. Lindsey acknowledged the name appeared on the report but said further checking of campaign documents produced no verification of any contribution.
The listing, he said, was inadvertent, and most likely occurred because Bishop was a personal friend whose name and address sat in the campaign’s office and rolodex files. Lindsey noted his 30-page report listed more than 280 individual contributors, said a double-check showed no record of a Bishop contribution, and pledged to file an amended report correcting the error.
Bishop’s campaign spokesman, Jon Gray, was unequivocal: Ed Bishop never made a political contribution to Sen. Lindsey. The campaign had no further comment, and the threatened challenge to his candidacy went away.
What loyalty rules were really about
The episode is a small window into a large transition. In 2007, Alabama Republicans were consolidating a majority that had been decades in the making, and party loyalty rules were one instrument for policing the boundary between old-line conservative Democrats and the newer Republican coalition — particularly in fast-growing Baldwin County, where crossover friendships and small local contributions were ordinary features of political life.
The rules also carried real teeth: barring a candidate from the primary ballot is a far blunter tool than opposing him in it.
The outcome
The District 32 special election was won by Trip Pittman, who defeated Cooper and went on to hold the seat for more than a decade, eventually chairing the Senate’s budget committee. Bishop remained on the Baldwin County Commission. And Lindsey’s $150 clerical error, having threatened to reshape a Senate race, disappeared into an amended campaign finance report.