Mobile’s legal community delivered its verdict in the spring of 2004, and in at least one race it was not close. Mobile attorney Robert H. Smith was a landslide winner in the Mobile Bar Association’s “best qualified to serve” poll for Place 1 on the Alabama Supreme Court, drawing 320 votes from local members.
Whether that hometown support would translate into statewide backing was a question for November. Smith, the Democratic nominee, was set to face either incumbent Justice Jean Brown or her Republican challenger, Tom Parker. In the bar poll, Brown drew 127 votes and Parker 22.
Local circuit races
In the contests closest to home, the attorneys who practice before these judges every day made their preferences plain.
- Circuit Court, Place 11: Republican Charlie Graddick was favored over Democratic hopeful Edward C. Blount Jr., 374 to 105.
- Circuit Court, Place 8: Incumbent Republican Judge Pamela Millsaps outpolled her Democratic opponent, Thomas Jeff Glidewell, 359 to 105.
Millsaps had recently been tapped by Gov. Bob Riley to take on the judgeship overseeing juvenile court, a vacancy created by the retirement of longtime juvenile court Judge John Butler, who had presided at Strickland Youth Center for more than two decades.
Statewide appellate races
In the Alabama Supreme Court Place 2 election, the Mobile bar supported incumbent Justice Roger M. Monroe with 214 votes, ahead of Baldwin County’s Pam Baschab (125) and Patti M. Smith (98).
The Place 3 race — the most crowded and hotly contested of the group — drew a scattered field. Mobile’s lawyers backed Democratic contender John Rochester, a longtime Clay County circuit jurist, with 205 votes. Behind him came Peggy Givhan of Montgomery (72), Birmingham Probate Judge Michael F. Bolin (62), Jerry E. Stokes (19) and Denny Holloway (10).
Rochester was seeking the seat opened by the retirement of Justice Douglas Johnstone of Mobile, who at the time was the high court’s lone Democrat — a fact that gave the race unusual weight for the local bar and made Johnstone’s departure a milestone in the long realignment of Alabama’s appellate judiciary.
The widest margin of preference recorded anywhere in the poll belonged to Judge Sharon G. Yates, whose 366 votes dwarfed the totals of her two competitors, Tommy Bryan (32) and Win Johnson (20).
What a bar poll is, and is not
Bar association preference polls have long occupied an unusual place in Alabama judicial politics. They are not binding, they do not appear on any ballot, and they measure the opinion of a self-selected slice of the electorate — the lawyers who appear in these courtrooms and who arguably know the candidates’ work best.
Supporters of such polls argue that in judicial races, where campaign advertising is thin and name recognition often decides outcomes, the considered judgment of practicing attorneys is one of the few substantive signals available to voters. Critics counter that lawyers have professional interests of their own and that a bar poll can look like an insiders’ endorsement dressed up as expertise.
Either way, the results carried real information in 2004. The margins were wide enough — Yates by more than ten to one, Graddick by better than three to one, Smith by roughly two and a half to one over a sitting justice — that they were hard to dismiss as narrow preference.
Looking back
The 2004 cycle came at a moment when Alabama’s appellate courts were completing a transformation. Judicial elections in the state had grown into some of the most expensive in the country, funded heavily by business and trial-lawyer interests, and the partisan composition of the Supreme Court had shifted decisively. The retirement of Mobile’s Justice Johnstone removed the last Democrat from that bench.
For readers of local politics, the poll offered a snapshot of how Mobile’s bar saw the field before a single vote was cast at the polls — and a reminder that in judicial contests, the people who know the candidates best often vote first, and unofficially.