A leading conservative advocacy group said it will back Trump-endorsed former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville over former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Alabama Republican Senate primary.
The Club for Growth called for Sessions to enter the race in October of last year but reversed its position in light of Trump’s March 10 tweet endorsing Tuberville. After both Tuberville and Sessions fell short of a majority of the vote in the early March election, with Tuberville getting 33.4% of the vote against Sessions’s 31.6%, the contest moved to an April 14 runoff election.
“I think both of them can win, but I think if Trump is not fully on board it becomes harder. And he’s made it clear that Tuberville is his pick,” Club for Growth president David McIntosh told Politico. “Everyone is saying, ‘It’s so Republican, we should be able to do that.’ But if we’re split because Trump is on the other side and doesn’t really like Sessions, that could make it very hard.”
After Trump’s tweet on Tuesday, Tuberville was quick to capitalize on the president’s endorsement. “Help me finish what the President started and fire Jeff Sessions on March 31st,” Tuberville wrote in an email to supporters. “The President doesn’t trust Jeff Sessions. Neither should ANY Alabama conservative.” Sessions angered Trump after choosing to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s Russia investigation.
Sessions entered the race in November with the support of allies, including the Club for Growth, who at the time spoke to Sessions’s backing of the president during the 2016 campaign, when he was a senator, as reasons to believe that he could overcome any potential Trump resistance.
His departure from the Senate opened a narrow window for Democratic Sen. Doug Jones’s victory against former state Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore in a 2017 special election amid allegations of Moore’s sexual misconduct. Republicans have since been eager to reclaim their two-decade hold on Sessions’s seat.
Polling commissioned by the Club for Growth ahead of Trump’s endorsement last week placed Tuberville slightly ahead, leading 49% to Sessions’s 45%. Asked how they would vote were Trump to endorse Tuberville, the lead shifted by 24 additional percentage points in Tuberville’s favor. The polling was conducted between March 4-5 among 500 likely Republican primary voters in Alabama, with a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points, before Trump’s tweet backing Tuberville.
