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MUMBLINGS June 22, 2006
There is a lot of talk about politics, but unfortunately,
most people don’t participate in the activity when it comes
to voting.
Politics is democracy at work. It is a great
privilege to live in the greatest republic in the world and so
many of us do not appreciate the fact enough to go to the polls.
In the Democratic and Republican primaries just
held, only slightly more than 30,000 people voted in Baldwin.
This is out of a total number of registered voters of 96,000,
or about 32 percent. In the state, it was a little better but
not much. Statewide, the votes were a little under one million,
or 37 percent of all registered voters.
Baldwin is one of the strongest Republican counties
in Alabama, if not the strongest, as 87.49 percent of the voters
cast ballots in favor of Republicans, only 3,773 voted democratic,
or 12.43 percent.
State-wide, it was different…the number
of Republican votes cast was 460,000, whereas the Democratic vote
was slightly more at 462,000. Since most people in Alabama claim
to be Republicans, you may wonder why this is so.
While Baldwin was overwhelmingly Republican and
if you wanted to vote for any local candidates, you had to vote
in the GOP party. It was opposite to this in many other counties
where there were no local Republicans in a contest, so for people
to take a strong part in their local races, they had to vote Democratic.
This will not be the case in the General Election where people
can vote either Democratic or Republican, whichever they choose.
So far as winners and losers in Baldwin, there
were no real surprises. However, there were some surprises, the
main one being in the sheriff’s race. Indications that the
sheriff’s race was one-sided was indicated early and was
not even hot enough to bring out the voters. If a hot sheriff’s
race can’t bring out local voters, then nothing can. The
amazing thing in this was that the winner, Huey “Hoss”
Mack got 17,623 votes, whereas the incumbent got only 6,188 votes.
Although most people seemed to think Hoss would win, I don’t
think they thought it would be by this margin.
However, Jimmy Johnson has served this county
well and its not many county sheriffs that serve as long as five
terms, or 20 years. The life of a sheriff seems to be a maximum
of 20 years, as they make enemies and people grow to the point
that they want a change. One exception was the late Taylor Wilkins,
who served for 28 years before he was defeated. Reflecting back
in history, I recall that Wilkins only beat Ham Hall 19 votes
in one very close election. But the other times, he won handily
and was able to be elected seven terms
The runoff election, July 18, will hold even
less interest to Baldwin County voters since there is only one
position contested. This is Fourth District County Commissioner
where Charles Gruber received 40.21 or 8,286 votes and Steve Kirkpatrick
received 26.27 or 5,414 votes. The other two, Sam Mitchell 3,707
and Kevin Murphy 3,199 were enough to cause a runoff.
Gruber, the mayor of Elberta and as such, had
some support of the other 11 mayors in the county, or enough to
give him a substantial lead. However, Kirkpatrick is head of the
Elberta Fire Department and there are hundreds of volunteer firefighters
in the county. If he can activate them, he may have a good chance
of winning. In this case, it will be whoever gets out his votes,
because there will probably be less than 15,000 cast.
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