Well, in the end, it wasn’t all that close after all. Representative Spencer Bachus crushed his challenger, state Senator Scott Beason, by a 59-27 margin in Alabama’s 6th Congressional district last night, with two other candidates picking up a small amount of votes.
Bachus’s Wall Street–funded, $1.5 million ad campaign apparently worked. And Beason’s rabid anti-immigrant grandstanding may have hurt him. A 76-year-old Republican voter from Beason’s hometown told the Birmingham News last night that “I don’t like Beason. I just think he’s a demagogue.”
Given Bachus’s long history of gutting financial regulation and executing his belief that the federal government should “serve the banks,” many will be discouraged that he pulled it out. But it’s not easy to weep for Beason, given his own xenophobic extremism, and one can certainly chuckle at what may be the saddest concession speech in history, which Beason delivered last night at the Gardendale Civic Center:
Bachus is very likely to win against the Democratic nominee this fall in the heavily Republican district.
