Democrats in Close Race for Alabama Nomination

Lt. Gov. Bill Baxley and Atty. Gen. Charles Graddick were running neck and neck in early returns Tuesday night in a runoff election for the Democratic nomination to succeed George C. Wallace as governor and guide Alabama into a new political era.

The returns, with 82% of the precincts reporting, gave Graddick 360,330 votes and Baxley 356,207.

The winner of the Democratic runoff will face Republican nominee Guy Hunt in the November election, but Hunt is given little chance of victory because no Republican has been elected governor of Alabama since 1874.

Despite a noisy and bruising three-week campaign, state election officials predicted that the final tally of votes would show a lighter-than-average turnout.

An Ideological Choice

Alabama does not register voters by political party and the runoff was held one day after two circuit judges ruled differently on the question of whether 35,000 voters in the Republican primary could cross over and vote in the Democratic runoff. Graddick had appealed for the GOP vote Monday.

The runoff, required by the outcome of balloting in the June 3 Democratic primary, offered Alabama voters an unusually clear-cut ideological choice. Baxley, 44, a former two-term attorney general who lost a 1978 race for governor, is a frequent Wallace ally who ran as a self-proclaimed liberal and openly embraced his support from labor unions and blacks. Graddick, a 41-year-old Mobile native now in his eighth year as attorney general, staked out a conservative “law-and-order” position and directed his campaign chiefly toward white voters.

But the ideological contrast between the two candidates was overshadowed by continued name-calling and charges of racial politics.

‘Petty and Negative’

“It may have been as personal, petty and negative a campaign as we’ve had in our history,” said Gerald Johnson, chairman of the political science department at Auburn University. “There has always been a flamboyant, highly personal style to Southern politics, but it has been engaged in with a sense of joy. This campaign is a poor imitation of that style.”

The candidates began taking aim at each other from the moment the primary results earlier this month matched them up for the runoff out of a five-candidate field.

“Bill, you better circle your wagons, fella, ‘cause we’re getting’ ready to come at you,” Graddick said with a clenched-jaw expression as his supporters cheered.

Baxley, in turn, raised the specter of racial division’s marring the runoff contest. “I hope that this race doesn’t degenerate into a race where people are trying to divide us by race,” he said.

Baxley’s Prospects

In an attack that appeared to be the most damaging to Baxley’s prospects, Graddick called the lieutenant governor a “liar” for denying any misuse of state cars. The Birmingham News had reported in March that state cars driven by Alabama troopers had been used to transport a woman reporter to and from the Montgomery apartment Baxley shares with five other men when working in the capital. The News later printed two pictures showing the reporter and a state trooper leaving Baxley’s apartment. But the car pictured was registered to Baxley’s campaign and not the state.

After the photographs were published, Baxley’s wife, Lucy, launched a series of news conferences in defense of her husband, beginning with one at their Birmingham home.

She accused Graddick and the Birmingham News of “shameful tactics . . . against our family,” and added that her husband had “in no way violated the trust in our marriage” and denied that he had a personal relationship with the reporter. The reporter, who resigned her job with the Associated Press on the day the day the News first published its allegations, has refused to comment.

Foe Called ‘a Coward’

Meanwhile, Baxley called Graddick “a coward” for backing out of their third scheduled television debate earlier this month and alleged that the attorney general had made a payoff in return for a runoff endorsement from former Lt. Gov. George McMillan, who had placed fourth in the Democratic primary. Baxley said McMillan aides had earlier approached Baxley’s campaign aides with a promise of support in return for $480,000 to help retire his campaign debts.

Both Graddick and McMillan denied Baxley’s charges.

In what many political observers viewed as a throwback to Alabama’s traditional race-baiting politics, Graddick ran television and radio advertisements accusing Baxley of being a tool of “special interests,” including “the black politicians.”

The runoff was a test of whether a candidate could be elected governor of Alabama without major black support. A June 16 Birmingham Post-Herald poll showed Graddick was favored by only 6% of black voters, while Baxley drew 86%. Blacks make up about 25% of the state’s 2.2 million registered Democratic voters.