Of the many lessons in the long process of choosing a new state senator from Baldwin County’s District 32, one seemed unassailable: it cost a great deal more to become the Republican nominee than the Democratic one.
Republican Trip Pittman, who no longer had the look of a rookie candidate, headed into Tuesday’s showdown against Democratic nominee and political veteran A.J. Cooper after months of handshakes, speeches and spending.
Two very different paths to the ballot
Pittman emerged from a grueling five-man primary and then a testy runoff, in which he defeated the front-runner, Randy McKinney. The two men differed little in political philosophy, but the contest still went sour for many Baldwin County Republicans when Gov. Bob Riley endorsed McKinney. Whether Pittman overcame the snub or was helped by it is a question that was argued in the county long afterward. Either way, it did not stop him.
Cooper, an Eastern Shore attorney, took a shorter and considerably cheaper road: he locked up the Democratic nomination by paying the qualifying fee. With no primary to fight, he launched his general election effort about 12 weeks before the vote.
The seat had come open when Bradley Byrne resigned from the Senate to become chancellor of Alabama’s two-year college system, setting off a special election in one of the most reliably Republican counties in the state.
The money
Pittman proved an adept fundraiser from the beginning, and his five-to-10-day pre-election disclosure showed him raising roughly twice what Cooper raised over the same period.
He opened the reporting stage with $62,891.81 on hand and raised another $23,835 in cash, plus $7,235 in in-kind contributions. He reported $71,453.88 in expenditures, leaving $25,072.93 for the final push.
Cooper began with nothing in his account. He raised $11,867 in itemized cash contributions, another $1,000 in non-itemized contributions and $300 in-kind, and lent his campaign $2,209.46 from his law practice. He spent $12,800.40 and had $2,276.56 on hand when his report was filed with the Alabama Secretary of State on Oct. 12.
The donor lists tell their own story about the two coalitions. Pittman’s contributors included Gulf Coast businesses and business figures — Volkert & Associates, Quality Filters, Vulcan Inc., Millette Administrators, Harris Morrissette, Elliot B. Maisel, Craig Dyas, John McMillan, Charles E. Klumb and Tracy Young among them, along with the political committee Alabamians for Luther Strange and a company associated with former Lt. Gov. Steve Windom.
Cooper’s list ran through the county’s Democratic organizations and its professional class: the State Democratic Executive Committee, South Baldwin Democrats, Eastern Shore Democrats, Kuykendall & Associates, WHL Architecture & Interiors, Nero Masonry, Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks, Prichard Mayor Ronald K. Davis, restaurateur Lucy Buffett and a long tail of $25 and $50 contributions from individuals.
What the race said about Baldwin County
The disparity was not merely financial. In a county where the Republican nomination had become effectively decisive, the competitive contest necessarily happened in the primary, and the money followed it there. The general election, for all its formal importance, functioned in large part as a ratification.
Baldwin County had also been transformed by growth. Once agricultural and coastal, it had become one of the fastest-growing counties in Alabama, its population swelled by retirees, commuters to Mobile and beach development along the Gulf. That growth brought the issues that dominated the race: coastal insurance rates that had climbed to punishing levels after Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina, road and school capacity, and how quickly the county’s institutions could keep up with the subdivisions.
Pittman won the election and went on to represent District 32 in the Alabama Senate for well over a decade, becoming chairman of the chamber’s education budget committee.
The League of Women Voters of Baldwin County had sponsored a debate between the two candidates at the Daphne Civic Center in the closing week, moderated by broadcast and print journalists — the kind of civic exercise that, in a county accustomed to being an afterthought in statewide politics, drew a genuine crowd.