MOBILE, Alabama — The winsome Katie Britt increasingly looks like the GOP primary front-runner to replace retiring Alabama Republican Richard Shelby in the U.S. Senate.
The Washington Examiner’s David Drucker reported today that former President Donald Trump may pull his longstanding endorsement in the race away from U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks. It comes on the heels of a major poll showing Brooks badly trailing Britt and Mike Durant, a businessman famous for surviving captivity in Mogadishu in the incident memorialized in the movie Black Hawk Down.
Brooks, the famously intense and hard-line conservative who told Jan. 6 protesters to go to the U.S. Capitol to “start taking down names and kicking a**,” has attempted several statewide races before without coming close to victory. He had been a harsh critic of Trump when Trump first ran for president but later, temporarily, became a Trump favorite because of his take-no-prisoners image. Still, more ideologue than practical politician, he never caught fire outside of his northern Alabama base. Trump now says he is finding Brooks “disappointing” and is open to changing his endorsement to either Durant or Britt.
Britt, just 40, and her husband Wesley, a former offensive lineman for the Alabama Crimson Tide and the New England Patriots, reportedly made a good impression in two meetings with Trump. She once served as Shelby’s chief of staff and then as head of the Business Council of Alabama, where she earned plaudits for helping small businesses navigate the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. She is clearly conservative, with a won’t-back-down feistiness, but without the sharp edges that turn off independent voters.
While Britt used a massive grassroots organizing effort to erode all of what originally was a huge polling lead for Brooks, Durant came out of political nowhere to make it a three-person race. A successful businessman (“engineering and services”) after his military bravery, he put forth a series of what, to this eye, were the most effective TV and radio ads of the campaign. Anecdotal evidence, though, indicates he has a substantially lesser political “ground game,” as might be expected from a late entrant into the race.
That ground game advantage for Britt, plus a weird issue from Durant’s past, may give Britt the edge. Decades ago, Durant’s now-estranged sister Mary Durant Ryan sued their mutual father for allegedly failing to continue with counseling treatment to which he agreed after he admitted to having molested her for years when she was a child. She produced letters from her brother Mike in which he acknowledged that his father had admitted to the abuse — but Mike later said in interviews that he thought she had “false memories” despite his father’s own confession.
His abandonment of his sister looked rather weird, and it does all sound tragic, with Durant caught between love for his father and for his sister. Durant has said the long-ago issue has no “relevance” to the race. Yet it comes only a few years after another Republican Senate nominee in Alabama, Roy Moore, lost an eminently winnable race after multiple allegations that he had made improper advances years before to teenage girls. After the Moore imbroglio, the whole “sexual impropriety with teens” meme may prove the proverbial bridge too far for state Republicans.
Neither Durant nor Britt has run a negative campaign, and neither is likely to do so soon. Both are impressive in their own rights. But Britt comes with no baggage, while having a surer grasp of local issues across Alabama’s 67 counties plus years of experience with federal issues on Capitol Hill. Quite Trumpian on immigration issues, she is particularly focused on stopping the flow of narcotics trafficked by illegal border-crossers. From a purely political standpoint, she looks and acts like a winner.
