Fred Barnes has a good rundown of the state of play in the Alabama Senate race this morning. He rightly zeroes in on the most important question in the race right now: Will Trump’s endorsement of of former Alabama attorney general Luther Strange, who was appointed to fill Jeff Sessions’s seat in January help put him over the top in the GOP primary?
However, there’s a secondary question here that’s worth looking at. Why is Trump helping McConnell and the establishment GOP elect their preferred candidate? It’s Alabama, so whoever wins the Republican primary is almost certainly going to win the general election. Strange is not the preferred candidate of a lot of Republican activists and voters in the state, where conservative Congressman Mo Brooks and popular state judge Roy Moore are also running.
Further, the temporary appointment of Strange to Sessions’s vacated Senate seat raised some serious questions about corruption. Strange was appointed by a governor buried in scandal, at a time when many think Strange, as the state attorney general, had obligations to be investigating the governor. The scandal swirling around Gov. Robert J. Bentley was quite serious, involving “sexually explicit conversations and the sudden firing of a top law enforcement official, and consuming hundreds of thousands of dollars from public and political bank accounts.”
Then there’s the issue of McConnell thumbing his nose at grassroots Republican voters. For a few election cycles now, McConnell and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have been trying to throw their weight around in Senate races by using their institutional clout. This has not endeared them to many conservative activists who think the establishment parachuting into local races with D.C. lobbyist money is unhelpful and unfair.
McConnell and the NRSC protest that grassroots activists often choose overly ideological—and unelectable—candidates such as Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Christine O’Donnell, who ran disastrous and sometimes embarrassing races in Nevada, Colorado, and Delaware, respectively. However, the establishment has backed its fair share of underwhelming candidates in recent cycles, such as Connie Mack in Florida, Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin, and Rick Berg in North Dakota. And the list of outsider candidates who challenged the NRSC in some way or another to get elected includes leading lights of the Senate republicans: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee. In 2014, the week before the Nebraska primary, forces aligned with McConnell were still bombarding Ben Sasse with attack ads shortly before he got nearly 50 percent of the vote and won every county in the state, save one, in a three-way primary. It was an utterly futile and wasted effort against a very qualified senator.
While it is often remarked that President Trump was elected to challenge the Washington establishment, it’s also true that unlike other recent election cycles, Trump’s election was not marked by a broader grassroots uprising against incumbents and GOP candidates perceived as “establishment” picks.
Trump’s endorsement of Strange doesn’t exactly speak to the president’s desire to “drain the swamp.” Further, the day after endorsing Strange—a huge gift to Mitch McConnell, considering Brooks and Strange have dueling campaign ads over who’s more supportive of of the popular president in Alabama—Trump sent out a tweet attacking McConnell by name over his failure to overhaul Obamacare. (And there was another tweet attacking McConnell this morning.) Trump may not be happy about McConnell’s failure to deliver on legislative priorities, but McConnell has to be pretty happy that Trump is delivering for him in a big way in the Alabama senate race.
