This year’s District 26 Senate race is marked by some hard-to-ignore parallels with the 2006 race.
The biggest similarity: Al Melvin, the Republican candidate defeated by a Democrat in the general election two years ago, is again running after winning the Republican primary.
Melvin, in winning the primary this year, knocked off a known name — Rep. Pete Hershberger, a veteran lawmaker and a moderate Republican. Melvin did the same in 2006, defeating then incumbent Sen. Toni Hellon, also a veteran lawmaker and a moderate Republican.
But one of biggest similarities is the positions taken by the general election candidates during both election years, according to Sen. Charlene Pesquiera, the Democrat who captured the District 26 seat in 2006 and is not running for re-election.
“There was a definite contrast of where I stood and my beliefs and what I wanted to do, and he (Melvin) had his own,” Pesquiera said. “Folks are really going to go one way or the other. There is almost no middle ground in terms of what we supported. And again, history is repeating itself. It’s the same with Cheryl Cage.”
Cage is the Democrat candidate hoping to succeed Pesquiera, who called it “almost a repeat performance.”
Melvin, though, said the mood in the country today is different than two years ago.
“It was just a bad year,” he said of 2006. “It was like a negative tsunami started on the East Coast and swept across the nation.”