Former state Sen. George Callahan was off and running in the spring of 2006 in his Republican bid to reclaim the south Mobile County seat he had lost four years earlier, and he began the way south Mobile County campaigns have traditionally begun: with a shrimp boil.
Callahan had held the District 35 seat until 2002, when he was defeated by Democratic challenger Gary Tanner of Theodore, who was the incumbent senator as the 2006 cycle opened.
Three Rallies, One District
The first of three planned kickoff rallies was held Saturday, March 4, at a shrimp boil in Coden. Callahan said a crowd of more than 200 turned out.
“We had over 200 people at the Coden event,” Callahan said.
A second shrimp boil and rally was scheduled for Saturday, March 25, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the community center in Tillmans Corner. Arrangements were still pending on a third rally somewhere along Dauphin Island Parkway. The campaign’s website, georgecallahan.com, was up and running as well, a detail worth noting in a cycle when a candidate’s web presence was still something to announce rather than assume.
The Geography of District 35
The three rally sites amount to a tour of the district’s identity. Coden sits on the bayou country of south Mobile County, in the heart of the seafood communities that stretch along the coast toward Bayou La Batre, where shrimping, oystering and boatbuilding have supported families for generations. Tillmans Corner is the sprawling commercial and residential crossroads west of the city. Dauphin Island Parkway runs south from Mobile down the peninsula toward the bay.
Together they describe a district that is neither urban Mobile nor rural Alabama but something particular to the Gulf Coast: working waterfront, suburban subdivisions and highway commerce, bound together by water on three sides and by an economy that has always depended on it.
That a campaign would open with a shrimp boil rather than a hotel ballroom reception is not incidental. It is the correct instrument for the constituency, and 200 people around boiling pots on a March Saturday is a real measure of organizational strength.
A Contested Primary First
Callahan’s path back to Montgomery ran through his own party. Mobile City Councilman Ben Brooks was also seeking the Republican nomination in the June 6 primary for the right to face Tanner in the November general election.
That set up a genuine test between two very different Republican profiles: Callahan, the former senator with a record in Montgomery and deep roots in the district’s older political networks, and Brooks, the sitting city councilman and attorney who had built a reputation as a fiscal conservative critical of the city’s tax and regulatory climate.
Why District 35 Mattered
The seat was one of the more closely watched legislative races on the coast that year. Tanner, a Democrat, held a district in a region that was trending steadily Republican, making District 35 exactly the sort of seat that determines whether a party’s legislative caucus grows or shrinks.
For south Mobile County voters, the practical stakes were concrete. A state senator’s influence reaches into road money, coastal insurance rates, seafood industry regulation, storm recovery funding and the annual scramble over education and general fund appropriations, all matters that hit hard in communities where a single hurricane season can reorder household finances.
The campaign that opened over shrimp pots in Coden in March 2006 would run through a June primary and, for the survivor, into a November general election, with the district’s political direction for the following four years riding on the outcome.