MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama voters will decide Tuesday who will become the Republican nominee for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, with two candidates vying for the position; Associate Justice Sarah Stewart, and former state senator and military prosecutor Bryan Taylor.
Whoever wins the primary will likely go on to win the general election in November, making Tuesday’s election all the more consequential.
But who is funding each candidate’s campaign, and by how much?
In terms of sheer dollars, Stewart has come out far above Taylor, raising more than $2.3 million since launching her campaign a year ago. Since entering the race last summer, Taylor has raised just under $120,000.
Both candidates’ fundraising has accelerated in recent weeks, with Stewart raising nearly $75,000 during the week ending on Feb. 23, and Taylor raising close to $47,000 – roughly 40% of his entire campaign haul – the same week.
Each candidates’ donors were also wildly different, something that has become a point of contention in the race.
The roughly $120,000 raised by Taylor’s campaign is made up of just 105 unique contributions of over $100, which, excluding the week ending on Feb. 23, was largely made from individuals. Including the past week, however, $40,000 of his contributions came from various political action committees based in Montgomery, four of which carried different names but were listed under the same address.
His highest campaign contributions were two separate donations of $15,000; one from the Alabama Realtors PAC in January, and the other from Forest PAC in February, both based in Montgomery.
Conversely, Stewart has received well over a thousand unique campaign contributions, with a much larger share of them coming from corporations and PACs affiliated with trial lawyers, a fact that Taylor has seized on.
“Such massive contributions from the trial lawyers to Sarah Stewart goes to show she’s the most liberal justice on the Supreme Court, and they’re trying to hijack our Republican primary,” Taylor told Alabama Daily News.
Stewart has, in fact, received a sizable portion of her campaign contributions from trial lawyers, receiving $304,000 from the Progress for Justice PAC, which is affiliated with the trial lawyers’ association, as well as another $775,000 from PACs funded, at least in part, by plaintiffs firms.
Those firms include Montgomery-based plaintiff’s firm Beasley Allen, which gave $480,000 to PACs contributing to Stewart, and Mobile-based Cunningham Bounds, which gave $420,000 to PACs contributing to Stewart. Cunningham Bounds was one of two firms representing the families that won the recent frozen embryo Supreme Court case that is the subject of national and state discussion at the moment.
Pushing back on Taylor’s assertion, Stewart argued that the presumption that trial lawyers generally favor Democratic candidates to be an “old, outdated argument.”
“For at least the last 15 years, those law firms represent some of the largest Republican donors in our state; they give to Gov. Kay Ivey, Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth, almost every member of the Legislature, and every currently sitting Supreme Court justice,” Stewart told ADN.
“Almost all of Chief Justice (Tom) Parker’s money in his 2018 race came from trial lawyers, and no one could or would accuse him of being a liberal Democrat.”
Furthermore, Stewart pointed to the nearly $648,000 reportedly spent on behalf of Taylor for television advertisements by Fair Courts America, a Super PAC founded by Republican mega-donor and billionaire Richard Uihlein that she called an “out-of-state dark money group.”
Taylor said his campaign had no connection to the Super PAC, but that he was “happy” to have their support after researching the organization’s positions.
“They must have read Stewart’s rulings, saw that she is bankrolled by liberal trial lawyers, and concluded that she is the most liberal judge on the Alabama Supreme Court,” Taylor told ADN.
“Apparently, my conservative judicial philosophy and commitment to following the law as written and never legislating from the bench has resonated with them, like it has resonated with conservative Republicans across Alabama.”
To see Stewart’s campaign financials in their entirety, click here, and for Taylor’s, click here.