Recently filed campaign finance reports showed few shake-ups in the state’s key races. Frontrunners competing for the Republican nomination in statewide races continued to outraise their competition, while lesser-known candidates relied more heavily on self-funding.
Senator Tommy Tuberville, who quickly consolidated support behind his gubernatorial campaign this year, raised just under $700,000 in donations during August. The campaign spent $333,359.32, mainly on fundraising, administrative services and consultants.
The two Democratic candidates for governor, Chad “Chig” Martin and Will Boyd, both raised relatively paltry amounts.
Martin received barely above $3,000 in donations over the entire month and spent almost $1,000 on various campaign expenses.
Boyd raised $5,914.95 in cash contributions in July: the largest single donation was $420. He also reported $16,500 in in-kind contributions, with one contribution valued at $6,000 from DavidPersonMedia, LLC.
However, all three candidates who have filed campaign finance reports in the race for agriculture commissioner so far appear to have sizable sums on hand. All three are also Republicans with significant ties to agriculture in the state who are self-financing their campaigns to a large extent.
The elected head of the Department of Agriculture and Industries, the state agriculture commissioner, oversees food safety programs as well as a wide-ranging portfolio of other regulation and supervision programs governing the state’s agricultural sector.
State Senator Jack Williams donated over $200,000 to his campaign early this year and then loaned another $250,000 on the final day of July. The owner of J Bar W Farm, along with his wife, Williams championed a ban on lab-grown meat during a recent legislative session. He ended August with a balance over $500,000.
Christine Woerner McGinnis, described on her campaign website as “a fifth-generation farmer from Baldwin County,” loaned $275,000 to her own campaign at the close of August.
She had previously loaned $50,000 in February and received donations of $25,000 and $20,000 respectively from McInnis Construction, LLC and one George Woerner. Her monthly campaign finance report for August was not available at the time of writing.
The third candidate, Corey Hill, is also a farmer and loaned his campaign $40,000 in May. Hill ended August with a balance of just under $125,000, according to his most recent campaign finance report after spending over $2,000 on predominantly fundraising-related expenses.
The incumbent commissioner, Rick Pate, is currently seeking the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in a contest with sitting Secretary of State Wes Allen. He could not run for another term as ag commissioner due to Alabama’s two-term limit on the office.
As one of the two major candidates in the race for lieutenant governor, Pate raised almost $30,000 in August and spent almost $10,000. Expenditures included a $2,500 “sponsorship” of Alabama Policy Institute, the conservative think tank.
Allen, the frontrunner according to a straw poll released in June by the College Republican Federation of Alabama, significantly out-raised Pate, though. He raised over $100,000 and spent over $15,000, mainly on the services of PR firm Virtus Solutions.
The three minor candidates in the race—Nicole Wadsworth, Dean Odle and Patrick Bishop—all reported negligible fundraising numbers for August, or had not had their filing uploaded to the Fair Campaign Practices Act Reporting System at time of writing.
APR also reported yesterday that the two leading candidates in the race for secretary of state have hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank. Former Congressional candidate Caroleene Dobson out-raised but also outspent state Auditor Andrew Sorrell in August.
