A quiet suggestion was making the rounds among south Alabama Democrats in early March 2009, and it was the kind of suggestion that reveals more about a party’s anxieties than about its plans.
Some supporters of Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom Jr., a perennially mentioned prospect for the 2010 governor’s race, were encouraging him to bypass the Democratic primary altogether and run instead as an independent. The reasoning was straightforward, if unflattering: in a primary against U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, the congressman’s base might simply prove too much to overcome.
Whether the overture interested Folsom and his advisers enough for them to seriously entertain it remained uncertain.
The arithmetic problem
The idea met immediate skepticism from other quarters of the party, and the objections were less about loyalty than about counting.
An independent candidate of Folsom’s stature would all but guarantee that Alabama’s next governor would be chosen by a plurality rather than a majority. The state provides no runoff following a general election, so a three-way race would simply hand the office to whoever finished first, however modest the margin.
“I would think that scenario favors (the Republican nominee) pretty clearly,” said one Democratic politico, “unless I’m looking at it too simplistically or am not giving Folsom enough credit?”
Caught between a rock and a hard place
Another observer of state politics described Folsom’s position as a genuine trap, and one largely of the Democratic Party’s own construction.
Inside the primary, Davis’s strength among African-American voters could well be more than Folsom could surmount. Outside the primary, running as an independent in what this observer called a three-legged stool of a governor’s race, Folsom would likely finish third.
The structural difficulty, as he described it, was that the party’s reliance on the Black vote can cripple a white candidate facing a credible Black opponent in the primary — particularly if a competitive Republican primary on the same day pulls less party-aligned voters across to the other side of the ballot.
“Jim can’t win without black votes,” he said. “He wouldn’t even be the second leading vote-getter.”
And the independent path, he argued, would not even accomplish the spoiler’s traditional purpose. “It seems to me he wouldn’t gobble up enough of the white vote to elect Artur,” he added. “What white vote he got would come more from Artur than the Republican nominee.”
Why it mattered
The conversation was, on its surface, about one man’s ballot line. Underneath, it was about whether Alabama Democrats could hold a coalition together through an open governor’s race.
Folsom carried one of the most recognizable names in Alabama politics. He had served as lieutenant governor and, after the removal of Gov. Guy Hunt in 1993, had finished out that term as governor before narrowly losing the office in 1994. He was, in the shorthand of state politics, the last Democrat many white rural voters had been comfortable supporting for the top job.
Davis, meanwhile, represented Alabama’s 7th Congressional District and was assembling what looked like a formidable primary operation, built on a base that party strategists in both camps regarded as difficult to dislodge.
The independent trial balloon was, in that light, an admission. It conceded that some in the party did not believe their strongest general-election candidate could survive their own primary, and it invited a remedy that most of the people asked about it believed would simply elect a Republican.
No one involved appeared eager to say so on the record. But the fact that the idea was circulating at all, more than a year before the primary, told its own story about the state of the Alabama Democratic Party heading into 2010.