A former senior aide to Sen. Richard Shelby has jumped into the Alabama Senate race, a sign former President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Rep. Mo Brooks is not scaring away competitors.
Katie Britt, Shelby’s former chief of staff, announced her candidacy Tuesday, forging ahead with a bid to succeed her old boss, who is retiring in 2022, despite the weight Trump’s endorsement carries with Alabama Republicans. In a nod to that reality, Britt, most recently CEO of the Business Council of Alabama, is framing her campaign around the work she did with Shelby to shepherd the Trump agenda through Congress.
Asked how she planned to differentiate herself from Brooks and beat the odds in the primary, Britt said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner that she was running as a stalwart conservative who would also get things done. It was a subtle dig at Brooks’s reputation as a congressman more interested in rabble-rousing than legislating.
“It’s easy to identify problems in Washington, but I firmly believe my experience implementing real solutions will set me apart,” Britt said. “Alabama needs an effective senator who both represents our values and actually delivers results.”
Britt’s ability to outflank Brooks with grassroots Republicans is questionable. Most GOP insiders in Alabama do not expect her, or any other candidate, to pull it off unless the congressman falters on his own. But she does have some early support from members of the vast Shelby alumni network, connected Republican operatives who have worked for the senator over the more than four decades he has spent in Washington.
“It was an honor to stand with Sen. Shelby to bring opportunity to every corner of our state, confirm conservative judges and justices, and help build President Trump’s border wall,” Britt said in her announcement video, before touching on her subsequent work at the business council. “I’m proud of my accomplishments in business and our nation’s capital.”
If Trump’s endorsement of Brooks is Britt’s Achilles’s heel, fundraising is her strength.
Support from Shelby and his diaspora of former staffers is one pipeline for campaign cash that should be lucrative. Relationships Britt established with small-business owners and corporate executives as head of the Alabama Business Council are another. However, some political observers in the state caution, Britt’s fundraising from this crowd could face challenges. The business community could be wary of making an enemy of Brooks, who appears more likely to become their next senator.
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Britt’s entry into the Senate race brings the number of prominent contenders to three. In addition to Brooks, endorsed by Trump several weeks ago, Lynda Blanchard, a wealthy businesswoman who Trump appointed United States ambassador to Slovenia, also is seeking the Republican nomination. Britt might not be the last to get in, as additional Republicans continue to mull a Senate bid.
That is somewhat surprising given just how pro-Trump Alabama is. In the 2020 Republican primary, the once-beloved former senator, Jeff Sessions, was defeated by now-Sen. Tommy Tuberville primarily because Trump campaigned against him. The 45th president was angry with Sessions for how he handled his duties as the first attorney general of his administration.
To navigate around the Brooks/Trump roadblock in the primary, Britt is wrapping herself in a biography and family history rooted for generations in Alabama. Her great-grandparents founded a local church, Britt said in her announcement video, her parents owned the local hardware store, and her husband, Wesley Britt, was a star football player at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where they met.
Trump’s endorsement record in Alabama is not perfect. In 2017, the candidate he backed in a special election for the Senate lost in the GOP primary.
Sessions had resigned from the Senate to join Trump’s Cabinet, and Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange was appointed to succeed him. Strange had to turn around immediately and run in a special election to earn the right to finish the remainder of Sessions’s Senate term. Trump endorsed him, but he ended up falling in the GOP primary to Roy Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
The majority-Republican electorate in the state deemed Moore too flawed for their vote, giving the edge to Democrat Doug Jones, who served in the Senate until he was ousted by Tuberville last November.
