According to the campaign finance reports filed over the past few days by candidates for statewide office, frontrunners continued overshadowing their competitors’ fundraising efforts in July. Some actually began to spend their campaign cash.
Senator and gubernatorial candidate Tommy Tuberville reported raising over $722,000 in cash contributions over July, including a $100,000 donation from the Protective Life Corporation, a life insurance company based in Birmingham.
His campaign also spent over $250,000 in the past month. A $51,233.09 payment to TAG LLC for advertising services was the largest single expenditure, but the campaign also seemed to have invested heavily in direct mail campaigns.
Democratic candidate Chad “Chig” Martin’s campaign finance report shows a far smaller monthly fundraising haul of under $4,000 for July, with over $1,500 spent on various campaign expenses. The other Democratic candidate, Will Boyd, had not filed a campaign finance report at the time of publication.
Fundraising in the race for lieutenant governor was quite similar to how it played out in June, with current Secretary of State Wes Allen and Agriculture Commissioner Rick Pate both continuing to fundraise successfully while other, more fringe candidates struggled.
Per Allen’s July report, his campaign raised around $140,000 and spent almost $9,000, mostly on payments to Virtus Solutions for various purposes. A communications firm based in Troy, Virtus Solutions boasts that many members of the state legislature have been its clients on the company website.
Pate raised a comparable sum of just over $100,000 over the course of July, according to his monthly report. The largest donation appears to have been from the Alabama Poultry Trust. The report also shows he chose to hire Cardinal Consulting Group to assist his campaign.
Minor and relatively inexperienced candidates Nicole Wadsworth, Dean Odle and Patrick Bishop all reported more meager fundraising totals for July. Of the three, Wadsworth raised by far the most with $10,050 in cash donations.
The Republican primary for attorney general also looks likely to be a two-person race, at least as far as fundraising goes.
On Monday, candidate Katherine Robertson filed another major contribution report disclosing a $100,000 donation from First Principles Action, Inc. A Tennessee-based nonprofit founded in November 2024, First Principles Action, already directed a $1 million donation to Robertson earlier this year.
The similarly named First Principles Foundation, founded on the same day with the same registered agent and address, is led by Peter Bisbee, the former executive director of the Republican Attorneys General Foundation. In July, a state official told APR columnist Josh Moon that the previous $1 million donation was “obviously a way around Alabama’s laws that prioritize disclosure of donation sources.”
Fellow candidate for attorney general and former state Supreme Court Justice Jay Mitchell also has almost $1.5 million on hand, according to his most recent filing. However, while Mitchell has received several large donations over the course of his campaign thus far, the amount of cash he has is largely due to a June transfer of over $600,000 from his previous campaign as a candidate for the Supreme Court.
Pamela Casey, Blount County district attorney and the third candidate in the race for attorney general, ended July with a hair under $90,000 in the bank after receiving over $7,000 in donations and reporting around $3,500 in in-kind contributions to her own campaign.
