SBHGOP's blog

Democrats have rallied behind state senator and former physician Parker Griffith. He is generally well thought of in Huntsville (the district’s largest city) and has previously run for mayor there before being elected to the state senate. He will be well funded and he’s not spending much because he’s not being strongly opposed in the primary. I could not find the TV a he's running online but I’ll post it when it goes up. Anyway, I’ve seen it and it’s pretty good.

The Republican side is not as clean-cut. There are at least six candidates but probably only two that have a legitimate chances to win. The consensus frontrunner is insurance executive Wayne Parker. He nearly defeated retiring Congressman Bud Cramer in 1994 and had a pretty good campaign structure quickly  fall into place that was in part left over from that effort. Huntsville attorney Cheryl Baswell Guthrie is the other candidate with a reasonable chance to win. She has previously run for the state senate but was defeated by Griffith in 2006. 

[Parker ad]

[Guthrie ad]

Some have said that AL CD-5 is the best GOP pickup opportunity in the country this year and it’s not difficult to make that case. There's a lot of GOP votes and money in the district and it went for Bush twice. The district has been held by the same Democrat (Cramer) since before the Republican Revolution and this will be the first legitimate shot at winning it since Wayne Parker’s  ’94 effort. It will mainly depend on whether the GOP winner can unify everyone and raise the money, but Griffith's message of "party doesn't matter, solutions matter" will be hard to beat either way (my paraphrase). 

WHNT out of Huntsville hosted a debate among all the candidates that’s posted online for anyone that's interested.