MOBILE — State Sen. Gary Tanner served notice that his re-election campaign in Senate District 35 would not be a modest undertaking, raising more than $50,000 at a rally in Mobile, according to his campaign.
The celebrity hosts for the event were drawn from the only rivalry that reliably fills a room in Alabama: former University of Alabama quarterback Scott Hunter and one-time Auburn running back Willie Huntley, now a Mobile attorney. Nearly 200 people attended, among them Mobile Mayor Sam Jones, whose own election a few months earlier had been engineered by several of the same hands.
A team with a track record
Tanner’s re-election operation reunited the consultants who had carried him to victory in 2002 and who had more recently run Jones’ mayoral campaign: Rick Heartsill of Direct Communications in Birmingham; Tom Oppel of Message Audience and Presentation in Austin, Texas; and the Cunningham Harris fundraising group.
A Democrat, Tanner had previously served as a Mobile County commissioner before moving to the state Senate — a familiar career path in a county where the commission has long been a proving ground for statewide and legislative ambition.
The rematch that would not go away
Tanner, 60, faced the prospect of a familiar opponent in November: former state Sen. George Callahan, who had begun working the comeback trail within days of his 2002 loss to Tanner. The 2002 contest had been among the more expensive and hard-fought legislative races on the Gulf Coast, and neither man had forgotten it.
But Callahan would not necessarily have a clear path to a rematch. Mobile City Councilman Ben Brooks, according to reliable sources, was giving serious thought to a run for the state Senate seat himself — though a race for a circuit judgeship remained a possibility for him as well. A contested Republican primary would force Callahan to spend money in the spring that he would rather have saved for the fall, and it would give Tanner months of quiet in which to build his war chest.
Why District 35 mattered
Senate District 35 covered a swath of Mobile County that had become genuinely competitive as the region’s politics realigned. Alabama Democrats still held a Senate majority in Montgomery in 2006, but their margin depended on incumbents like Tanner surviving in districts where Republican voters were growing more numerous with each cycle. A defeat in Mobile County would have been read statewide as a sign of which way the ground was moving.
That is why a legislative race in one county drew consultants from Birmingham and Austin, why a $50,000 rally was worth reporting, and why the identity of the eventual Republican nominee mattered as much as anything Tanner did. Money raised early in Alabama politics is not merely money; it is a message to potential opponents about the cost of entry.
The football theory of fundraising
It is difficult to overstate how neatly the Hunter-and-Huntley pairing captured Alabama’s civic culture. A Democratic state senator seeking a bipartisan crowd could hardly have chosen better than a former Crimson Tide quarterback and a former Auburn running back sharing a stage in support of the same candidate. In a state where the Iron Bowl divides families, a room in which both sides are represented is itself a kind of political statement — and a reliable way to sell tickets.
By the time the rally broke up, Tanner had his headline number, his consultants had their proof of concept, and the Republicans interested in his seat had a rather clearer idea of what the year would cost them.