Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin has conceded to Rainbow City Police Chief Jonathon Horton in the Republican primary for the sheriff's office.

Horton is expected to be the county's next sheriff, as there are no Democrats or independent candidates on the ballot for the general election, though multiple potential challengers are considering write-in campaigns.

"I thank God and my wife and I believe that this is a credit to running a clean, transparent campaign," Horton said in a phone interview Tuesday night.

Horton said he received a concession call from Entrekin at around 8:15 p.m. Tuesday following early returns showing Horton with an overwhelming lead. Etowah County's probate office reported that Horton received 12,196 votes and Entrekin received 6,742 votes in the contest.

Horton rode the wave of anti-Entrekin sentiment that followed the publication in March of an AL.com investigative report that revealed that Entrekin had personally pocketed more than $750,000 worth of funds allocated to feed inmates in the county jail he oversees as sheriff. The story made national headlines and dogged Entrekin for the rest of the campaign.

"We never recovered from that first article," Entrekin told The Gadsden Times Tuesday night, referring to the March report. He did not respond to multiple requests for comment made by AL.com after he conceded Tuesday evening.

In the weeks following the article's publication, Horton repeatedly pledged that if he won the election he would give any excess inmate-feeding money to the sheriff's office to bolster its budget, and that he would not personally keep any of the funds.

Entrekin responded to the article by holding a defiant press conference during which he claimed that he had done nothing wrong by keeping the funds and said that he would continue to keep the funds unless a law was passed to bar him from doing so.

The race became especially heated in its final weeks, with much of the controversy playing out online. An anti-Horton website called Expose the Snake went live last month with videos slamming the candidate and court documents that showed that Horton had been accused of domestic violence in the past and that in 2006 he crashed into a car while driving under the influence, badly injuring the driver.

Meanwhile, a number of anti-Entrekin Facebook pages - such as Million Dollar Sheriff, which posted cartoons and memes that poked fun at the sheriff while decrying his policies - cranked out content in recent weeks.

Etowah County attorney Frank Bailey had planned on challenging the GOP primary winner as an independent candidate, but on Friday he announced via Facebook that he was dropping out of the race and backing Horton's campaign.