Last week I talked about young state auditor Andrew Sorrell.
When I had him on my Montgomery TV show recently, we talked about his successful career as state auditor. He understands the golden rule of politics, “money is the mother’s milk of politics.” In his 2022 race, he achieved an amazing record and broke $714,000 and was able to outspend his opponents 7 to 1.
More impressively, he spent the 7-to-1 lead wisely and wisely. He designed and produced his own television commercials, which cut distribution and production costs by 20 percent. The most impressive revelation was that he wisely used his personal campaign time in places where he took advantage of the politics of friends and neighbors.
His opponent, Rusty Glover, had a very strong base of support in Mobile, where he had been a state representative, state senator and taught school for years. Stan Cooke, his other opponent, was a well-known preacher in Jefferson County. Because of this, he recognized that these two urban enclaves would vote for their native sons, which they did.
Sorrell realized that this left him as the only candidate in North Alabama. He was from the Muscle Shoals, Tuscumbia, Florence area and worked in the Tennessee Valley area as a child. He brought the rich vote to North Alabama. He also worked and farmed the Wiregrass where there was no hometown candidate. He did well there too with the help of television.
In the runoff with Glover out, Sorrell went down in Mobile/Baldwin and got Glover’s votes and defeated Cooke in the runoff. What surprised me was that in 2022 the old “premise of friends and neighbors” still prevailed and even more surprising that it existed in a low-profile electoral race.
I have been preaching and talking about the pervasive friend-and-neighbor policy in Alabama for the past 20 years in my columns. When people come to visit me hoping for a statewide race, I let them know it still exists, especially in governor’s races. Those of us who are students of Southern and Alabama politics attribute the theory of exaltation of friends and neighbors to the brilliant Southern political scientist Dr. VO Key Jr.
In Key’s textbook, “Southern Politics in State and Nation,” written in 1948, he notes that friend-and-neighbor politics has existed in the South for decades. I’m here to tell you that it still exists today.
What is friends and neighbors? It’s simply a trend that people will vote for someone in their neck of the woods. Alabamians will vote overwhelmingly for a candidate from their county and adjacent counties. When I taught southern politics in college classes, I used to tell students that this habit of voting for the hometown boy in Alabama politics was so widespread that if a candidate from his county or neck of the woods ran in the whole state and was a known drunkard. or thief they would vote for him. They might say, “I know Ole Joe’s a drunk or a thief, but he’s my drunk or a thief.”
You can look at every governor’s run for the last 80 years and see our local friends and neighbors voting for the hometown candidate when you dive into the numbers. It is unmistakable.
Key illustrates this well, first in the 1946 races for governor, congress, and US senate. There was an open United States Senate when Roosevelt nominated our liberal senator, Hugo Black, to the supreme court. Tennessee Valley Congressman John Sparkman won the Senate seat with a hometown vote of 75 percent from Madison and Morgan counties. This Tennessee Valley congressional seat was won by Scottsboro attorney Bob Jones because he got an unheard of 97.8% of the vote in Jackson County.
That same year, Big Jim Folsom won the 1946 race for governor because he had two hometowns. Big Jim was born and raised near Elba in Coffee County, but spent his adult life in Cullman, north Alabama. In that 1946 race, Big Jim got 72 percent in Cullman and 77 percent in Coffee in the first primary, where his statewide average was 28 percent in the crowded field.
You can point to countless examples in every gubernatorial race since 1946. There are clear examples of localism and regionalism voting for the candidate from your neck of the woods. The friends and neighbors policy is still alive and well.
Steve Flowers served 16 years in the state legislature. Follow him on Twitter @SteveFlowersAL.
