DESPITE TRUMP SCORN, BROOKS RISES
GOP candidate tests former president’s power in Alabama
CLANTON, Ala.
Two months ago, Rep. Mo Brooks, whose hardright credentials were unblemished, seemed to be imploding in the Alabama Republican Senate race.
Under a rain of attack ads, polls showed him falling behind two rivals. Former President Donald Trump humiliated Brooks by rescinding an earlier endorsement.
But Brooks has staged a compelling comeback, with recent polling putting him in a statistical tie for the lead in a tight race before the primary Tuesday.
In a twist of fate, the Brooks bounce-back appears to be driven by voters who identify as “Trump Republicans” — another bit of evidence, after recent primaries from Nebraska to Pennsylvania, that the former president’s political movement may no longer be entirely under his command.
“Brooks may be surging just at the right time,” a conservative talk radio host, Dale Jackson, said over the Birmingham airwaves Friday.
Brooks — who appeared at Trump’s Jan. 6 rally before the siege of the Capitol, where he goaded election deniers to start “kicking ass” — has returned to contention not only despite Trump’s fickleness but also in the face of opposition by Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader. A super PAC aligned with McConnell has funneled
$2 million to a group attacking Brooks in television ads.
In 12 years as an archconservative in the House, Brooks has bucked party leadership, which won him no fans among Senate Republican leaders. McConnell and his allies would prefer a different replacement for the open seat of Sen. Richard Shelby, 88, who is retiring. Alabama’s deep-seated conservatism means that the Republican nominee is all but assured of winning in
November.
A polling average by Real Clear Politics showed Katie Britt, a former aide to Shelby, in the lead with 34 percent, Brooks with 29 percent and Mike Durant, a military contractor and Army veteran, with 24 percent. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent on Tuesday, the top two advance to a runoff on June 21.
“Slowly but surely, conservatives are figuring out I’m the only conservative in this race,” Brooks said in an
interview. He called Durant “a John McCain-type of Republican” and Britt “a Mitch McConnell-establishment, open-borders, cheap-foreign-labor, special-interestgroup Republican.”
A poker-faced former prosecutor, Brooks nonetheless seemed to savor, at a couple of campaign appearances Friday, his comeback from March, when he was polling in the teens and Trump abandoned him. The former president accused Brooks of having gone
“woke” because he had urged a crowd, months earlier, to put the 2020 election “behind you.”
Brooks, 68, “is the least woke person in the state of Alabama,” said Terry Lathan, a former chair of the Alabama Republican Party, who is a co-chair of the Brooks campaign.
In style and experience, there are strong differences between the stolid Brooks and the energetic Britt, a lawyer whose first digital ad featured her marriage to Wesley
Britt, a former University of Alabama football star — no small credential in a state where the other senator, Tommy Tuberville, is a former Auburn University football coach. Britt, 40, presents herself as a committed social conservative. Campaign ads feature her calling to get “kids and God back in the classroom” and, while striding through a girls locker room, accusing “crazy liberals” of wanting to let boys in.
A poll Thursday for The Alabama Daily News and Gray Television showed that likely voters who identified as “traditional conservative Republicans” favored Britt and Durant over Brooks.
But Brooks won the support of a plurality of voters who identified as “Trump Republicans” — 35 percent, up from 26 percent in an earlier survey.
The race has seen millions of dollars spent on negative ads attacking all three candidates that in many ways have shaped the turbulent peaks and valleys of their campaigns.
Despite the Trumpian snub, Brooks continues to falsely maintain that the election was stolen from the former president, a view widely held by Alabama Republicans.
On May 12, Brooks was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. On that date, Brooks, wearing body armor, had asked the roiling crowd of Trump supporters gathered near the White House, “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?” Not long after, the protest became a riot and the Capitol was breached.