Excuse the Wednesday morning quarterbacking, but I thought that Riley's campaign was lackluster, particularly down the stretch. His campaign was too much of "I am not Don Siegelman", and seemed a little short on the issues. "I am not Don Siegelman is plenty good enough for me, but I suspect that there's a large block of people who want to hear more.
Another factor is that bugsy ran some pretty effective negative advertising late in the campaign concerning Riley's alleged failure to pay property taxes and something else to do with disability claims by his employees. Riley's negative advertising occurred earlier in the campaign and those issues would have appeared "stale" had he ran them again in response.
Finally, and I have no first-hand proof of this, but I'd suspect that there were the usual shenanigans going on in the heavily commiecrat areas to try to rig things Siegelman's way. They just underestimated the number of votes they'd have to steal.......
Seigelman sounds a lot like Hodges here in SC. Hodges pounded Sanford with negative ads that featured lies and no new ideas. Sanford stuck to his issues and was very positive. It was closer then I would have liked but at least we all have Repub Govs now. Hurray!