MOBILE, Alabama — There’s a new U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, Katie Boyd Britt, who is a political consultant’s dream. In the next year, we’ll see if she can ride the winds of, or perhaps transcend, the new, Trump-ized political culture.
Britt was here in this coastal city June 25 for the second time already since announcing for the Senate just 17 days earlier, after energetically traversing this territorially substantial state from corner to corner several times — all while also in the midst of two out-of-state trips driving her children, rising sixth and seventh graders, to out of state athletic events and “Christian-based” summer camps.
Nobody who has watched Britt’s career in Alabama for the past 20 years will be surprised at her work ethic. It alone makes her a formidable candidate for the seat of retiring six-term senator Richard Shelby, Britt’s former boss — even though former president Trump, always wildly popular in Alabama, endorsed U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks for the seat months before Britt entered the race.
Brooks has been in public office (sometimes elected, sometimes appointed) since way back in 1982, which is the same year Britt was born. Yet if resumes are your thing, Britt at age 39 already has one that is boffo. As a high school student from Alabama’s wiregrass region, she was the national runner-up in what was then known as America’s Junior Miss (now “Distinguished Young Women”), a national college-scholarship-award program hosted here in Mobile whose famous alumni include TV journalists Diane Sawyer and Deborah Norville. In college, Britt was student government president at the 19,000-student University of Alabama, where campus politics are famously feisty.
Britt served on Shelby’s staff, rising to press secretary, before leaving to get a law degree. She married Alabama offensive tackle Wesley Britt, who played professionally for the New England Patriots (including a conference championship season) for four years before moving to an economic development job with Alabama Power. After several private sector positions, Katie Britt rejoined Shelby’s team as chief of staff when Shelby, a famously influential Senate chieftain, was chairman of the Banking Committee, then the Rules Committee, and, finally, the king of committees, Appropriations.
Britt left Shelby again after two years to become president and CEO of the Business Council of Alabama, one of the most powerful forces in state government, where in 29 months she reportedly erased a $600,000 deficit from a $3.7 million budget while refocusing the organization from its big-business reputation to a facilitator (and, during the pandemic, sometimes savior) for small businesses across the state.
Clearly, Britt is a get-it-done personality and more than tough enough for the political trenches. One doesn’t run Shelby’s office or the BCA without inner steel. But it must be said that she doesn’t look like a battle-scarred politico. Trim and somewhat petite, she has the smile and approachable mien of an enthusiastic PTA volunteer organizing a bake sale. Impressions in politics are of utmost importance, of course, and she gives the impression of someone who may be a bit over-aggressive in her sales pitch but who is nonetheless likable because one can see she sincerely and somewhat winsomely believes in her cause.
Or, rather, her causes. There can be no doubt that she is solidly on the political right, checking all the right issues boxes and sounding particularly impassioned on judges, national defense, debt, support for Israel, and opposition to Chinese abuses. On the federal debt, she says her experience working for the Senate’s lead appropriator and her insistence on eliminating the BCA’s long-running annual deficits give her some budget-related bona fides others might lack.
Still, except for her frequent repetition of the phrase “Christian conservative values,” Britt speaks, or at least spoke, at her June 25 Mobile event, more like an old-school, politics-is-local candidate than a fiery crusader trying to push conservative hot buttons conspicuously enough to get on Fox News. (The camera likes Britt, though, so it may not require her to engage in loud yelling for Fox News to notice her.)
Most of her speech was a litany of how only the right knowledge and approach can secure policies of the sort that will help Alabama. This wasn’t a list of pork-barrel desires, but rather a “broad federal policy affects local people” kind of pitch. She uses details and spews statistics without notes in a way that shows exhaustive preparation, and she hits the locality in a pitch-perfect way.
Take her mention of national fisheries policy: “On [red] snappers, you had to teach this girl from the wiregrass something about them; you know, we [in inland counties] do bass and brim, so [snapper catch limits] was totally new to me — and then oyster beds at Dauphin Island.” Then she’s off on a pitch a local economic developer would love, about the container port and the rail system and the booming local aerospace industry. But just when it sounds like she’s a local Chamber vice president, she goes national again:
“So, look at [Democratic election bill] H.R. 1, working to undermine the fabric of this nation, looking to federalize our elections. Guys, we can’t let that happen. That’s a slap in the face to the states. We need voter ID. We don’t need ballot harvesting. We don’t need your tax dollars going to fund different people’s campaigns.”
And, bringing up the border, she notes that a full 20% of illegal immigrants captured in Texas say they were headed to Florida — and that the only way to get to the Sunshine State is by crossing through Alabama. “They are capturing 3,677 pounds of drugs [from border-crossers].…In 2018, for every 100 people in this state, there were 97.5 prescriptions written for opioids….”
And on she went, seamlessly explaining how national policies affect Alabama citizens, with granular detail — and with 6’8” husband Wesley occasionally wading in with down-home, rather endearing personal asides.
In sum, Katie Britt has an adroit, borderline-Promethean political talent. For national conservatives, she bears watching.
