Tim James held a news conference at 5 p.m. June 4 to announce his decision to formally ask for a recount.

James now trails Robert Bentley by 167 votes for second place in the GOP primary, a spot that earns a place in the July 13 runoff election.

James requested for a recount of 85 percent of the counties, starting with those that have the most Republican votes.

James will be paying for the recount and hopes that it should be finished sometime next week.

The Crimson White spoke with James Tuesday to ask about the current state of the race and his controversial campaign.

Crimson White: What’s the latest you can tell Alabama students about the recount process?

Tim James: We are just waiting on the Secretary of State to certify the race. They cannot even count the provisional ballots until Tuesday. We’re really just waiting on the Secretary of State to tell us where the race is.

But, I think it’s a very close race, far less than one half of 1 percent. In football terms, this is about one minute left in the fourth quarter, and you play the game until the last second ticks off the clock. There is just this large number of provisional ballots that need to be counted, and they can’t be counted until Tuesday.

CW: Do you expect to be in the runoff?

TJ: We’ll just have to wait and see. We are down by 208 votes and we know that the number of provisional ballots is [more than] a thousand or considerably higher. The data from every ballot from every county and every box is being transferred to the secretary of state, so all the math has to be checked out. We’ll just have to wait and see where the Secretary of State … lands on certification.

CW: What do you think contributed to your surge in the polls?

TJ: I think it’s just the theme of the campaign, the common sense message to the people of Alabama—returning to the basics of Common Sense resonated. That’s what this campaign has been about since day one. If we’re fortunate enough to take it to the next level, the message will not change: common sense, living within our means, things that matter to Alabamians.

CW: Are you concerned that your ads led to national media figures mocking Alabama’s political process?

TJ: Not a bit, it comes with the territory … When The New York Times and Rachel Maddow [are] attacking me, then we must be doing something right.

CW: What would be the key issue for you in the Republican runoff?

TJ: It’ll be conservative versus liberal. It’ll be, ‘Do you want lawyer-politicians or do you want outsiders?’ That’s where we are in this country. We need to elect business people. We need to elect outsiders. We need to elect true, tested conservatives that have been there for a long, long time.