A.G. Gancarski
One of the myriad weird moments in Monday night’s Mayoral Debate was when Lenny Curry and Alvin Brown both refused to say who they would vote for in the Sheriff’s race. Were they being nonpartisan? Or were they both looking to stay out of what has become the most personal and heated race on the ballot this cycle, given the revelations that have dropped against both candidates in recent news cycles?
Consider: the Sheriff’s race is in a dead heat. The two candidates have two debates within a 24 hour span that could decide it. And one candidate has gone more proactive than the other with messaging ahead of the events.
“Recently my opponent has chosen to launch a series of negative attacks against me rather than discuss with you the serious issues that face our community.”
These words start off the latest Facebook video from the Ken Jefferson campaign, which is a 2:40 spot that talks about the financial difficulties the Democratic Sheriff candidate and his Republican opponent, Mike Williams, have had.
“I’m saddened to see him take this gutless approach,” the ad continues. “However, as an honest man myself, he has raised a few issues that need to be addressed.”
And so Jefferson addresses them. His issue with unpaid child support, of which he “caught up and paid every dollar, because it was the legally and morally correct thing to do.”
He also addresses the “time I fell behind on my taxes. As you can imagine with the IRS, the penalties and interest have snowballed at a rate faster than I could keep up with.”
Jefferson is working with the IRS and his attorneys to pay back every dollar and satisfy the obligation.
“Unlike my opponent, I have told you the truth even when it didn’t make me look so good,” Jefferson continued, slamming Williams for “a troubled pattern of personal borrowing and overspending” that left the Republican “$400K in debt on a $200K home,” after which “he quit paying his mortgage payments and allowed the home to go into foreclosure” while making over $130K per year.
Jefferson then hits Williams hard for not telling the Times-Union the truth about ever being sued, due to his foreclosure situation, then saying “it was simply an oversight,” then saying that “he was not sure that he was properly served a foreclosure notice.”
Jefferson’s point is that both candidates have had those issues. They surfaced in mailers from the Williams campaign, as well as in the first televised debate these two men had last week. You can expect them to surface again in Wednesday night’s and Thursday night’s debates. The only question is one of who will bring them up. And many voters will remember those stories far more vividly than what the candidates will say about Prevention, Intervention, and Enforcement, or about body cameras for police, or about the potential Jacksonville has for a Ferguson/Baltimore/North Charleston type situation, or about community policing.
The Sheriff’s race stayed relatively clean until just before the First Election, in which Jimmy Holderfield was the subject of some last-minute negative publicity that arguably knocked him out of the runoff. Now it is a bare-knuckled brawl. With the candidates polling in a dead heat, there is no expectation that these guys will hug it out in either of the debates on Wednesday or Thursday night.
