On August 15, Alabama Republicans will begin to choose their candidate for the race to fill Jeff Sessions’ Senate seat. If none of the 9 candidates wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two will face each other in a runoff on September 26. And the winner of that contest will face the top Democrat in a general election on December 12. So lopsided is Alabama’s electorate that any GOP nominee is likely to go on to win the general election, and so the primary is being treated as though it were the general election.
Luther Strange, the Alabama attorney general appointed to the seat in February, and Mo Brooks, congressman from the state’s 5th district, are the leading candidates in the field. So far they’re vying for the position of Most Pro-Trump Candidate Ever. Brooks’ criticisms of Trump during the 2016 primary race make his current enthusiasm for the president a touch implausible—at the time he called Trump untrustworthy and a “serial adulterer”—and indeed this may have cost him Trump’s endorsement, which on Tuesday night came via Twitter to Strange. But Brooks is firmly on the Trump Train in any case: In one ad, he vows to filibuster any budget that doesn’t fund Trump’s border wall.
For his part, Strange is promising to help Trump “drain the swamp” and kill the “unfair trade deals with Mexico and China” and otherwise making cringe-worthy statements about how “President Trump is the greatest thing that’s happened to this country. . . . I consider it a biblical miracle that he’s there.” Roy Moore, a former state supreme court chief justice and perpetual Alabama also-ran, is polling a competitive third. He emphasizes social issues more than the front-runners, but he, too, embraces Trump.
None of these candidates strikes us as especially appealing. All three have adjusted their pitch to match Trump’s ideologically muddled populism—just one election and suddenly they’re passionate about building border walls and scrapping NAFTA. None possesses qualities likely to appeal beyond the narrow Alabama constituency. We’d rather see one of these three win the general election than to see their Democratic opponent win the seat, though that’s true mainly because we’d rather not see Chuck Schumer run the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, is spending truckloads of money to back Strange against both Brooks and Moore—a reported $8 million, so far—as though the outcome of the Alabama primary could somehow shake the republic. One of the McConnell-backed ads slams Brooks for being insufficiently pro-Trump, quoting the congressman’s words during the 2016 primary: “I don’t think you can trust Donald Trump with anything he says.” Of course, McConnell himself was deeply ambivalent about Trump’s candidacy, as were nearly every GOP senator not named Sessions. The majority leader’s new insistence on pro-Trump purity is, to put it plainly, a nasty piece of sanctimonious balderdash.
The decision to throw so much money behind Luther Strange doesn’t make much strategic sense, either. Brooks is far from an ideal senate candidate in our view—fluidity of expression is not his strong point, and the pro-gun ad he ran after the Congressional baseball game shooting in June was in extremely poor taste by any standard. But Strange isn’t just a lackluster candidate; he’s a seriously flawed one. He was appointed to the Senate by Governor Robert J. Bentley, who resigned in April and pled guilty to misdemeanor charges that he converted campaign funds to personal use in an attempt to hide an affair with his communications director. Strange was attorney general and was supposed to be investigating Bentley. Instead, he was appointed to the U.S. Senate. He can’t be the best candidate, even in Alabama.
We suspect the reason for McConnell’s recklessness is the usual one—power. The majority leader is trashing one weak candidate instead of another weak candidate, not for any matter of principle, but simply because he thinks he can manage one better than the other.
Where did McConnell get his reputation for cynicism, we wonder?
