Gov. Bob Riley owns plenty of cowboy boots. After this week’s Republican runoff in Baldwin County, the open question among south Alabama Republicans was whether he owns any coattails.
Eastern Shore businessman Trip Pittman defeated Riley-backed Randy McKinney by roughly 57 percent to 43 percent in the GOP runoff for the state Senate District 32 seat — a decisive margin in the reddest corner of a red state, and one that came despite the personal intervention of a popular two-term Republican governor.
An endorsement that arrived late
McKinney, a south Baldwin real estate executive and state school board member, had been the early front-runner and embraced his ties to Riley from the opening of his campaign. In the closing days, with the race tightening, the McKinney campaign aired a television spot featuring the governor’s enthusiastic endorsement.
In for a penny, in for a pound. As events played out, in for a pounding.
The seat had come open when Bradley Byrne resigned to accept Riley’s appointment as chancellor of the state’s troubled two-year college system. Pittman, a first-time candidate who ran against the establishment and courted a grass-roots coalition, will face Democratic nominee A.J. Cooper — an Eastern Shore attorney and former mayor of Prichard — in the Oct. 16 general election.
Not the first time
The result echoed a pattern from the previous year. In 2006, Riley’s popularity at the top of the Republican ticket was not enough to carry GOP lieutenant governor nominee Luther Strange or Drayton Nabers, the party’s candidate for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, to victory.
The jokes started immediately. One veteran Democratic lawyer asked whether Cooper could reach 25 percent in the general election. The answer came back: “Thirty percent if Riley publicly endorses Pittman.”
No hard feelings, one official says
Republicans in Baldwin County moved quickly to argue that the episode would not fester. One county GOP official said the governor called Pittman on election night to congratulate him as soon as the results were in.
“It appears that the endorsement helped Pittman from all accounts,” the official said. “I spoke to Trip about this issue and assured him that Gov. Riley would be a Pittman man after the race. Trip responded that he knew that it was only politics and wouldn’t let that get in his way.”
“Trust me, I know that there have to be some strange feelings about this type of issue,” the official added. “However, after a couple of fights where you are on the governor’s side or he comes to your aid, it all goes out the window. Bob Riley is loyal to those who support him. Make no bones about that.”
What the result suggested
Baldwin County in 2007 was in the middle of a long boom — a fast-growing, heavily Republican county where a legislative seat could turn on tax appraisals, property insurance and how much of the county’s tax revenue came back from Montgomery. Pittman’s campaign had leaned on that resentment of the capital, criticizing the flow of Montgomery political action committee money into his opponent’s account.
For Riley, the loss was a bruise rather than a wound. He was term-limited and would leave office in January 2011, and the business of the state moved on. But the runoff left behind a live argument inside the party about whether a sitting governor should intervene in a primary between two Republicans at all — an unwritten rule that many longtime party loyalists believed he had broken.
The immediate practical question was whether the divided Republican electorate would reunite in time for the Oct. 16 general election against a capable and experienced Democratic opponent.