Earlier this month, Mobile County Commissioner Jerry Carl managed to earn a hard-fought four-and-a-half percent, 3,853-vote win over former State Sen. Bill Hightower (R-Mobile), to win the Republican nomination for Alabama’s first congressional district election in November.
In his victory, Carl only won two of the six counties in AL-1, Mobile and Washington. However, his strong 5,000-plus vote win in Mobile County, by far the district’s most populous county, was the difference in the contest.
Given that somewhat narrow margin of victory, Carl acknowledged his campaign would continue to work heading into the November 3 match-up against Democratic Party nominee James Averhart during an interview with Huntsville radio’s WVNN on Friday.
“As you know in the state of Alabama, everything is pretty much related to Donald Trump in some fashion,” he said. “So many of these people will go out and be energized just to pull a straight ticket. We’re focused on our base. Our base has brought us this far. We certainly want to stay with our base. And we want to focus on some of the committees that we have interest in and start working in that direction to let folks like our ag community understand, which we were supportive of by the Farmers’ Federation — make sure they’re going to have a voice in Washington, and just start touching back with those people that actually got you here. The folks that voted for our opponent, chances are that most of them will still stay with the Republican Party. People support a candidate, obviously, for an array of reasons. Maybe we can slow them up a little bit to look at some of our policies, some of our views, and we can win those back over.”
“We also can’t forget about that voice out there, that there are so many people that the only time we’ve seen them to come out and vote was in Donald Trump elections,” Carl continued. “I mean, you don’t hear from them. You don’t see them but my gracious, they show up at election time. So, we’re doing the same thing we did before. We’re still working our social media page. We’re still trying to keep the chatter going for the next 100 days. And that will be a lot easier than we have. We did it for a year-and-a-half, almost. The next 100 days, we can probably do that one backwards.”
Carl called Averhart a “formidable” opponent and maintained he would continue to work in his effort to win the U.S. House of Representatives seat currently occupied by U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Fairhope).
“We do have a very formidable candidate that we’re running against — a 25-year Marine veteran, so we’re just not taking that lightly, and we’re going to work hard.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Alabama, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly and host of Huntsville’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN.
Don’t miss out! Subscribe today to have Alabama’s leading headlines delivered to your inbox.