A Senate election of contrasts in Alabama could become a three-horse race.
A Senate election of contrasts in Alabama could become a three-horse race.
A labama’s Republican primary race to replace the retiring Richard Shelby has, thus far, garnered only modest national attention. Alabama is a safe Republican state in all but the most unusual of circumstances. Republicans have won double-digit victories in Alabama in the last six presidential elections and the last eight regular Senate elections. Roy Moore’s loss to Doug Jones in the December 2017 special Senate election required a perfect storm, including a souring national environment, a uniquely bad Republican candidate with decades of personal and political baggage, a divided state Republican Party, a credible Democrat, and a low-turnout special election.
2022 promises to be a good Republican year, which gives Alabama Republican voters a luxury: So long as they don’t pick a Roy Moore, they can simply focus on choosing the candidate who would best represent them in the Senate. The candidate is then likely to hold the office for quite some time. Shelby, the retiring incumbent, is 87 years old and has been in office since 1987, back when he was a Democrat.
Five candidates have entered the race: Congressman Mo Brooks; former Shelby chief of staff Katie Boyd Britt; decorated Army veteran Mike Durant; failed 2020 House candidate Jessica Taylor; and former U.S. ambassador to Slovenia Lynda Blanchard. Brooks and Britt are the two serious candidates in the race so far, although Durant should not be counted out.
The deep-pocketed Blanchard dropped out of the race earlier this month after meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and apparently plans to run a primary challenge to Governor Kay Ivey instead. Reports by the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Bender and CNN’s Alex Rogers both claim that “Trump has told associates he blames Ivey for the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park Commission’s decision to prevent him from holding a pre–July 4 rally over the summer at the state-owned facility.”
Let’s take a closer look at the field and the state of play on the road to the May 24, 2022, primary.
Mo Brooks
In theory, this was supposed to be Mo Brooks’s turn. The 67-year-old candidate has been in Congress for a decade and was first elected to the Alabama legislature in 1982. A diehard conservative, Brooks is a career politician by any definition, but the sort who is temperamentally and ideologically most at home when he is on the outside kicking in.
It is hard to avoid Trump in placing Republicans on the political spectrum these days, even Republicans — such as Mo Brooks — who were in public office for nearly three decades before Trump crashed the party. Brooks has had a complicated relationship with Trump. In 2016, Brooks was a Ted Cruz guy — predictably, if you know anything about Mo Brooks — and chaired his campaign in Alabama, where Trump won every county in the state and outpolled Cruz two-to-one. Alabama, run by the local political establishment, never had much of a Tea Party movement. Following Jeff Sessions, the first senator to endorse Trump, the establishment was more comfortable with Trumpian populism than with Cruz’s brand of small-government iconoclasm.
In 2017, when Sessions left the Senate to become attorney general, Brooks ran for his seat. The state party split in two that year: State attorney Luther Strange was appointed to fill Sessions’s seat but was seen as too close to Robert Bentley, the scandal-tarred Republican governor who resigned rather than face impeachment by a Republican legislature. Right-wing populist Roy Moore ran as the outsider. Strange, who had defeated Brooks for lieutenant governor in 2006, was the candidate of the Republican establishment, and “Big Luther” (as Trump dubbed him) received the then-coveted Trump endorsement.
On paper, Brooks should have offered an appealing alternative: He wasn’t tied to a crook like Bentley, and he had never himself been removed from office like Moore. He was plenty conservative and had the backing of talk-radio figures such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Instead, he finished a distant third, with 19.7 percent of the vote, double digits behind Strange and nearly 20 points behind Moore. Brooks simply didn’t have the popular touch to make up the ground.
The race was an embarrassment for Trump and a fiasco for Republicans. Strange lost to Moore, who blew the seat to Democrat Doug Jones. Trump took a measure of revenge for his various grudges in Alabama’s Senate race in 2020, by endorsing former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville. Tuberville defeated Sessions (who, by then, was out of favor with Trump), Moore, and Bradley Byrne, an Alabama political veteran who had lost a runoff to Bentley in 2010 and had his own checkered history with Trump.
Since then, Brooks has overcompensated to ingratiate himself with Trump. He was the first House member to announce that he was objecting to certifying the 2020 election, and has found himself dragged into controversies over the leadup to January 6. Brooks is hardly the type to involve himself in a riot — he is being unfairly targeted in a lawsuit by Eric Swalwell blaming him for the violence — but he went overboard with the “Stop the Steal” stuff, and extricating himself from it has proven expensive and draining. When it came to a vote on the objections, Tuberville sided with Trump and Brooks; Shelby, who has chaired the Senate’s Intelligence, Banking, Rules, and Appropriations Committees, did not.
Brooks got one benefit in return: Trump’s endorsement to replace Shelby in the Senate. In July, Trump came out firing for Brooks against Britt, framing the contest as part of Trump’s broader proxy war against Mitch McConnell:
I see that the RINO Senator from Alabama, close friend of Old Crow Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby, is pushing hard to have his “assistant” fight the great Mo Brooks for his Senate seat. She is not in any way qualified and is certainly not what our Country needs or not what Alabama wants.
At the time, the Britt camp framed this as a sexist belittling of Britt’s staff work, as if she were just a little lady getting Shelby his coffee every day rather than running an elderly senator’s office and staff.
But Brooks has struggled to keep Trump’s favor. Trump has reportedly been impressed with Britt, and CNN claims to trace the former president’s discontent with Brooks to an August rally at which Brooks told the crowd to move on from the 2020 election, and was booed for doing so. As he has sagged in the polls, Brooks has had to reshuffle his campaign staff. Politico lumped Brooks in with other Trump-backed Senate candidates who have struggled.
Brooks has always been a more dogged than charismatic campaigner, as his failure to catch fire in 2017 illustrates. He has never been a free spender as a campaigner, and that tightwad spirit is one reason why he has been backed by the Club for Growth.
What Brooks lacks in youth, charisma, and sometimes judgment, however, he has in conservative street cred. Nobody doubts that Mo Brooks is a conservative all the way down. He’s a mule, and sometimes what a Senate caucus needs is a few mules.
Katie Boyd Britt
Katie Boyd Britt has her own advantages, and her own challenges. As a 39-year-old mother of two school-age children, Britt would be a novelty. No woman has ever been elected to the Senate from Alabama. There have been two prior female senators: Maryon Pittman Allen was appointed in 1978 to finish the term of her husband, who died in office, and Dixie Bibb Graves was appointed in 1937 by her husband, then the governor, to finish the term of Hugo Black when he was appointed to the Supreme Court. Each served less than a year. Even after Blanchard’s departure, Britt and Taylor give the primary field two women out of four candidates, at a time when another Republican woman (Ivey) serves as Alabama’s governor.
Moreover, of the 21 Alabama senators to serve since the beginning of popular election of senators in 1914, only four have entered office younger than 50 years old, only one of those since 1946: Donald Stewart, who was 38 when he was elected in 1978 but served only two years, losing in the Democratic primary in 1980. The other three were Black (who was 41 when he entered the Senate in 1927), J. Lister Hill (who was 43 when he entered the Senate in 1938), and John Sparkman (who was 46 when he entered the Senate in 1946). Stewart, Black, and Hill all advanced to positions in Senate leadership. Black spent more than three decades as a Supreme Court justice. Sparkman was a powerful committee chairman who was only recently surpassed by Shelby as Alabama’s longest-serving senator. Brooks, who is 67, and Durant, who is 60, fit more the traditional good-old-boy mold of the state’s modern senators. Taylor is 37, and also a mother of three.
The two women are willing to make the most of that contrast. If you watch their campaign-launch videos, both Britt and Taylor spend the whole video talking to the camera, while Brooks and Durant rely much more heavily on outside narrators.
The diminutive Britt has energy and organization to spare. Observers have marveled at how well-organized her campaign is, particularly in contrast to Brooks’s. One symptom of that was signs sprouting all over from the day she announced. She will not be outworked or out-hustled. But as a smart, driven, perky young woman who has been on an overachieving trajectory from an early age — Girls State officer, Junior Miss, student-government and sorority president at the University of Alabama — she will have to persuade voters that there is more conviction to her politics than raw ambition, and is not just Alabama’s Tracy Flick.
Britt’s strength, and her weakness, is her status as a consummate political and business-community insider. She would walk into the Senate knowing how it works, while Brooks would walk in looking to throw sand in its gears. After serving as Shelby’s press secretary and chief of staff, she became president and CEO of the Business Council of Alabama (a career move recommended to her by Shelby), where she supported a hike in the state gas tax. She has been a registered lobbyist. Shelby has made no secret of treating her as his heir, sparking resentful criticisms from Brooks about turning the race into a coronation.
There has been much talk, albeit largely unsourced, about Shelby dumping as much as $5 million of his leftover campaign funds behind Britt; whether or not the $5 million figure is overstated, Shelby is open about the fact that he is committing significant resources to support her. Britt is flush with cash, with a significant fundraising edge over Brooks. She also has the backing of much of Alabama’s business community, and rolls out a seemingly neverending stream of endorsements from this or that business, farming, or community group.
Britt’s other not-so-secret weapon is her hulking, 6’8”, 320-pound husband Wesley. Wesley Britt is much beloved in the state for his days as an offensive lineman for the Crimson Tide in the early 2000s, where he played with his two brothers and rallied the crowd while being carted off the field from a broken leg in an epic 2003 game against Tennessee. He played in the NFL, mainly for the New England Patriots, where he briefly earned a starting job from Bill Belichick protecting Tom Brady. The couple talks movingly about their Christian faith and their terrifying brush with a 2011 tornado. Don’t underestimate the power of Alabama football. The Britts look the part, and that matters to Trump, who is rumored to be questioning his support for Brooks after meeting them and seeing how the Britt campaign runs.
Mike Durant
As if this race doesn’t have enough angles, Mike Durant entered the campaign in October. You may not immediately know his name, but if you’ve read Black Hawk Down or seen the film, you know his story: Durant was a Black Hawk helicopter pilot shot down in Mogadishu, Somalia, in October 1993, and unlike the rest of his crew that day, he survived that hellish experience to tell the tale and win a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He is a legitimate American war hero.
Now 60, retired after two decades in the Army, Durant started a successful engineering company that employs hundreds. He is running as a political outsider — always a potentially appealing brand with Republican voters in a race against a veteran politician and a staffer and business lobbyist. He’s also based in Huntsville, which is not just a hub of the state’s defense industry but also the center of Brooks’s district. That makes Durant a threat to draw support from Brooks, although the potential to play spoiler is limited by Alabama’s runoff system: If nobody gets 50 percent of the vote on May 22, there will be a top-two runoff on June 21.
Durant is a serious guy, and likely to have enough money to make himself heard. As a political newcomer, he remains hard to handicap this early in the race.
Jessica Taylor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZjC45ondj0
Somebody has to go full throttle southern populist in this race, and Jessica Taylor is ready to rumble, complete with a launch video firing a rocket representing the liberal agenda (just shooting it with a gun is passé now, I suppose). Taylor, who runs a company advising grant-seekers, lost a primary for Alabama’s second congressional district in 2020. Her then-husband Bryan Taylor, a former Alabama state senator who served as counsel to governor Kay Ivey, left to support his wife’s run for Congress. Taylor has been endorsed by Ted Nugent. Her style is no-holds-barred:
https://twitter.com/JessicaTaylorAL/status/1466602489629736960
The Polls
It’s early to draw too much from the polling in such a contest. It is easier to say what is not happening: Mo Brooks is not using his superior name recognition and Trump endorsement to put the race away early. Instead, with Britt spending early money to build her own profile, she is very much in the race early, and the field is wide open:
- A TargetPoint internal poll for the Britt campaign in November showed Britt over Brooks 31 percent to 30 percent, with Durant third at 13 percent.
- A Cygnal poll in November showed Britt at 24 percent, Brooks at 22 percent, and Durant at 9 percent, an improvement credited to Britt’s growing name recognition in the Birmingham market.
- A Strategy Group poll in November for the Alabama House Republican Caucus showed Brooks ahead at 28 percent, followed by Britt at 23 percent and Durant at 7 percent.
- A McLaughlin & Associates poll in December showed Brooks ahead at 31 percent, with Britt second at 26 percent and Durant third at 17 percent. The poll showed both Brooks and Britt with strong favorability ratings, but Brooks much better known, with nearly half of all voters still unfamiliar with Britt or having no opinion. Perhaps ominously for Brooks and most positively for Durant, the poll also found by a 69 percent to 13 percent margin that voters preferred a political outsider.
- A recent straw poll at the Young Republican Federation of Alabama’s Winter Gala put Britt well ahead, 44 percent to 28 percent for Brooks and 13 percent for Durant. Straw polls of this type are typically a better measurement of organization than genuine grassroots support, so it is unsurprising that this would play to Britt’s strength.
None of these polls are traditional high-quality independent polls, but then, such polls are often not that accurate this early anyway. Taylor is basically a blip in all of them, suggesting that she might have better luck setting her sights lower than the Senate.
It’s a long way to May. Conservatives know Mo Brooks; they still need to meet Mike Durant and test what Katie Boyd Britt really stands for. Durant, if he takes off, could be one of the year’s surprise political-outsider stories. Britt, if she prevails, could rapidly become one of the party’s rising stars. As for Brooks, he will find out whether everything he did to get Donald Trump in his corner was worth it.