Republicans in Alabama spent the years after 2006 puzzling over a question that seemed, on its face, to answer itself: how does a state that votes Republican for president, sends Republicans to the U.S. Senate and elects Republicans to most statewide offices keep sending Democratic majorities to Montgomery?
An examination of campaign finance records on file with the Alabama Secretary of State suggested one answer, and it had a name and an address. House Speaker Seth Hammett of Andalusia moved more than a million dollars through his campaign account in the 2006 election cycle, and very little of it went toward defending his own District 92 seat.
The scale of it
The Hammett campaign’s cumulative assets during 2006 exceeded $1.6 million, allowing him to spend more than $1.4 million. The money went out in checks to Democratic House candidates across the state, in amounts ranging from $1,000 to figures that dwarfed the budgets of most legislative campaigns.
How the money worked
The mechanism was not complicated, and it was entirely legal under Alabama law at the time.
Interests that were philosophically closer to the Republican Party, insurance companies, retailers, real estate, forestry, medical professionals and manufacturers, generously funded Republican challenges to Democratic incumbents. Then many of the same interests hedged, contributing to Hammett.
The speaker served as a middle man, giving where others dared not openly give after reaping substantial support from an array of political action committees. A business group could back a Republican challenger publicly and still, through Hammett, help protect the Democratic incumbent who chaired the committee its bills had to pass through.
The result was self-reinforcing. The party in power commanded both the legislative process and the cash flow, and the cash flow tended to keep it in power, including through the drawing of legislative district lines.
South Alabama on the receiving end
Among the many candidates who benefited from Hammett’s largesse were several from Mobile and the southwest Alabama counties:
- James Buskey of Mobile, $5,000
- Yvonne Kennedy of Mobile, $5,000
- Joseph Mitchell of Mobile, $10,000
- Thomas Jackson of Thomasville, $5,000
- Marc Keahey of Grove Hill, $70,262, of which $68,262 arrived in a single transfer on Oct. 25
- Skippy White of Pollard, $70,000, delivered in seven installments between August and late October
The pattern in the largest gifts is instructive. Modest, regular contributions of $1,000 or $2,000 flowed to safe incumbents through the spring and summer. Then, in the closing weeks of October, enormous sums landed in the accounts of candidates in genuinely competitive races.
Terry Spicer of Elba received $129,550, including $92,550 on Oct. 25 alone. Joe Carothers of Dothan drew $74,500. Ron Grantland of Hartselle received $52,500. Randy Hinshaw of Meridianville got $37,500.
That is not routine party support. That is a war chest being deployed, race by race, in the final days, wherever the speaker’s political operation concluded a seat could be saved.
Consultants in Washington and on Madison Avenue
The Hammett campaign also spent heavily on professional help, and not the local kind. Payments during 2006 went to:
- Silver Bullet Strategies of Washington, D.C., in nine payments
- Results of Montgomery, more than $63,000
- Sheinkopf Communications of Madison Avenue, New York
- Frederick Polls of Arlington, Virginia, $43,500
- Matrix of Montgomery
An Alabama House speaker retaining a New York communications firm and a Virginia pollster is a measure of how professionalized, and how expensive, control of a state legislature had become.
What it meant
Veteran Republican legislators, out of range of the cameras, tended to explain the paradox in exactly these terms. Alabama’s red-state identity was real at the top of the ticket and thin underneath it, because the machinery that decided legislative races ran on money that flowed through the hands of the man who held the gavel.
The arrangement did not last. Republicans captured both chambers of the Alabama Legislature in 2010, ending more than a century of Democratic control, and one of their first acts was to overhaul the campaign finance rules that had permitted money to be passed from PAC to PAC before reaching a candidate.