The special election that decided House District 12 was held hundreds of miles from Mobile Bay, but the argument it produced ran straight through south Alabama’s political circles. In late January 2008, Democrat James Fields defeated Republican Wayne Willingham by roughly 3,700 votes to 2,500 — about 60 percent to 40 percent — to fill the Cullman County seat vacated when Democrat Neal Morrison resigned to become interim president of Bevill State Community College.
Why the result surprised people
The seat had been in Democratic hands, so the outcome changed no arithmetic in Montgomery. What made it remarkable was the district itself. Cullman County’s population was more than 96 percent white and about 1 percent Black, according to figures from the county’s economic development agency. Fields is Black. Republicans had regarded the seat as a live pickup opportunity in a state where the GOP was steadily building toward legislative control.
Fields, a minister and former Marine widely described as an exceptional retail campaigner, won anyway — and won comfortably.
Two readings of the same returns
Democrats treated the result as evidence that the Republican march on the Legislature was overstated. Republicans, for the most part, tipped their hats to the candidate and declined to read anything larger into it.
A Republican legislator from Bayou La Batre called the loss disheartening and said his party might need to reexamine itself at the state and national levels, arguing that the GOP message was not reaching working-class conservatives. He had heard, he said, that Republicans were not united after their primary while Democrats were, and that annual property reappraisal — an issue Fields tied to Gov. Bob Riley — had hurt.
A state Republican official from Theodore was blunter about the strategy: the seat was a Democratic hold, it was uphill on the demographics, and it had not been among the party’s top 15 target districts. Their candidate, he added, was very good.
A Republican consultant said flatly that the outcome was a reflection of one man. A Mobile attorney called it remarkable, saying Fields had transcended stereotypes through personal strength as a candidate. A Birmingham communications professional went further, calling the loss an embarrassment for Republicans who, he argued, had assumed they would win on race alone, and comparing the moment to the 2005 election of Sam Jones as Mobile’s first Black mayor.
Others urged caution. A Republican state senator from Birmingham predicted the race would not be long remembered and said the corruption indictments then rumored in Montgomery would shape the 2010 legislative races far more than any special election. A former Mobile legislator asked the practical question: could Fields hold the seat in a general election, or would he prove to be a special-election phenomenon?
The larger current
The Cullman vote landed in the same week that Mobile and Baldwin county voters cast early ballots in Alabama’s presidential primary. A Mobile political consultant, surveying precincts on election day, predicted turnout of about 30 percent and hit it almost exactly. He also reported seeing out-of-state volunteers working for Barack Obama in south Alabama, and noted that Democratic turnout appeared to be running roughly 5,000 votes ahead of Republican turnout locally.
His conclusion was that Alabama politics had become less about race than it had been — pointing to Jones’s election in Mobile and to Obama’s momentum nationally as evidence of the same shift that produced the Fields result.
How it aged
Fields held the seat in the November 2008 general election, then lost it in the 2010 Republican wave that finally delivered the Alabama Legislature to the GOP after 136 years of Democratic control. Both readings of his 2008 win, in other words, contained some truth. He was an unusually strong candidate. And the Republican advance, delayed in Cullman for one January, arrived on schedule two years later.