Republican Rep. Bradley Byrne on Wednesday is to challenge Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama, arguing that the Democrat who won a surprise special election 14 months ago doesn’t reflect the state’s conservative values.
Byrne, 64, will be the favorite to recapture Jeff Sessions’ old Senate seat for the Republican Party in 2020 if he isn’t somehow tripped up in the GOP primary. Alabama is overwhelmingly conservative and especially supportive of President Trump, factors Byrne emphasized in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“So far, I don’t know of anything where he and I fundamentally disagree,” Byrne said, when asked if there was any daylight between Trump and himself on key issues. “Doug Jones is against building the wall.”
Byrne was referring to Trump’s efforts to build a physical barrier along the Mexican border to stem illegal immigration. Jones has joined the Democratic Party’s opposition to funding the wall. Byrne highlighted those differences, and focusing on the senator’s liberal record on guns and abortion — both problematic in a statewide race in Alabama.
Trade is one issue that could cause friction between Byrne and Trump. The president is threatening tariffs on imports as a means to exact fairer trading terms with foreign countries. That policy could ding an Alabama economy that relies heavily on global markets, as the state hosts multinational corporate satellites and exports billions of dollars in commodities and manufactured goods.
But Byrne, a former Democrat and business lawyer who was first elected to Congress in 2013, said he doesn’t foresee any major disagreements with the White House on this front.
“We’ve had many of these businesses come to us express concern about specific things. We’ve passed those concerns along to the White House and the Commerce Department, and they’ve been great about working with us,” he said. “I feel like we can work through most of the issues.”
Jones should be a relatively easy pick-up for the Republicans. His seat was held for two decades by Sessions, who resigned from the Senate to become the first U.S. attorney general under Trump. Sessions’ appointed successor, Luther Strange, lost his bid for election in the 2017 special election when GOP former Judge Roy Moore defeated him.
Jones is a dogged campaigner who is broadly popular. But the Democrat managed to advance to the Senate primarily because Moore, his opponent in a 2017 special general election, was a severely flawed candidate who was facing multiple on-the-record allegations of sexual misconduct.
Republican officials believe that Byrne, who holds the Mobile-area 1st Congressional District, is well-placed to emerge as the party’s candidate in 2020.
