The day after Alabama’s Super Tuesday primary, the results and the strange campaign that produced them gave local political observers plenty to sort through. In keeping with a long-standing tradition, a rotating panel of the area’s savvier political hands offered their reading of the winners, the losers and those somewhere in between. Their comments are shared here without names, as is the custom.
The presidential race
Several observers noted that Donald Trump, while winning Alabama, had not run up the towering numbers some in the national media had predicted, drawing largely in the 30s rather than the high 40s across much of the Deep South. One veteran read the outcome as evidence of a genuine anti-establishment mood among voters searching for an outsider – and questioned whether Trump’s rivals, chiefly U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, could consolidate the opposition before it was too late.
Alabama’s incumbents hold
The clearest theme was the durability of the state’s Republican incumbents. U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby dispatched challenger Jonathan McConnell without being seriously pressed, spending only a fraction of his war chest. U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne turned back perennial challenger Dean Young with about 61 percent of the vote, prompting one lobbyist to observe that Young’s commercials were potent but his campaign lacked the money and organization to win. U.S. Rep. Martha Roby likewise overcame a spirited primary challenge.
One Montgomery observer pointed to turnout as the real headline: nearly 900,000 votes cast, roughly 40 percent above 2012, bringing many first-time voters into the process and, in his view, strengthening the state party over the long run.
County crosscurrents
Closer to home, the panelists focused on the Mobile County Commission and a hard-fought circuit court race. Several judged Commissioner Jerry Carl weakened after squeaking out a 52-48 win and losing a majority of precincts, and questioned the political capital spent by Commissioner Connie Hudson and District Attorney Ashley Rich on endorsements that did not all pan out. One observer warned that Rich’s choices risked straining relationships in Montgomery at a delicate moment for a tax proposal she had requested.
The circuit court result drew particular attention. James Patterson won a seat over a candidate favored by much of the local legal establishment, a result read by several as a rebuke to the courthouse’s usual power centers. U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, an early Trump backer, was widely counted a winner for having read the moment before most of his peers.
Across the bay
In Baldwin County, one attorney tied the political mood to the school system’s finances, arguing that a tax-limiting campaign had left the schools short of money and shifted public sentiment. He counted the Fairhope city-schools movement and private academies among the beneficiaries of the turmoil, as families weighed their options.
Not every verdict was tidy. Patterson, several noted, had won at the ballot box while alienating colleagues with aggressive tactics – a candidate who was, in the panel’s telling, both a winner and a loser on the same night.
With two more installments of the panel’s analysis still to come, the observers promised additional verdicts on the races that would shape south Alabama in the months ahead.