He served during a long period in which Florida was effectively a one-party state dominated by Democrats, as the Republican Party had been weakened by the disfranchisement of African Americans by racist policies and Jim Crow laws.

Sikes entered the publishing business in Crestview, in the Florida Panhandle near Destin and Fort Walton Beach, working in that field from 1933 to 1946.

At the turn of the century, the Democratic-dominated legislature had passed a new constitution and laws that disenfranchised most African Americans, crippling the Republican Party, of which they had been the majority.

[1] Sikes was elected in 1936 to the Florida House of Representatives, during the Great Depression and a landslide year for the Democrats, aligned with the popular President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Sikes was a signatory to the 1956 Southern Manifesto[7] that opposed the desegregation of public schools ordered by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.

The district's voters began splitting their tickets as early as the 1950s, and voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every election from 1964 onward, except when the segregationist third-party candidacy of George Wallace won a majority in 1968.

In 1964, for instance, Sikes was reelected unopposed even as Barry Goldwater won the district by such a large margin it almost pushed Florida into the Republican column.

Sikes said the nickname was derived from a Panhandle legend about a male raccoon that not only knew where food and water were, but also fended off his enemies and looked after his territory.