Rep. Mo Brooks leaves little doubt about how he hopes to win the Republican primary for Alabama’s open U.S. Senate seat next year. The words “Endorsed by Trump” precede his name in his campaign logo, and the same message is printed in his Twitter handle.
As a result, Alabama is once again set up to host one of the most suspenseful Senate primaries in the country, with outside groups and candidates preparing to spend millions in a contest that will help shape the tone and tenor of the Republican caucus and the future face of conservative governance in the Deep South.
On one side of the divide is Brooks, a Freedom Caucus firebrand and one of the GOP’s most vocal supporters of overturning the 2020 election results. On the other is Katie Britt, a former business association president and former aide to retiring Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R), a giant in Alabama politics who has told others that he is willing to spend $5 million of his own campaign funds on her election.
The faceoff reprises historical divisions that have long bedeviled Republican primaries in the South, pitting the conservative economic development wing of the party, exemplified by Britt and Shelby — who has served as the most powerful Republican Senate appropriator since 2018 — against a fiercer brand of conservatism, represented by Brooks, that seeks to disrupt the U.S. Capitol to force more-conservative policies. It’s a split that often has less to do with policy positions in a state that Trump won with 62 percent of the vote — all the candidates in the race are Bible-believing conservatives — than style.
“It’s country club versus country,” said David Mowery, a Montgomery, Ala.-based political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats. “There is a weird dynamic where a lot of your business folks are also social conservatives. They just don’t want to be gauche about it. Wearing a .44 on your belt, a Ten Commandments T-shirt and a tricorner hat is outré.”
Complicating matters further is the late entry of a third candidate, wealthy businessman and celebrity military veteran Mike Durant, who spent $1.2 million on ads since mid-October months to introduce himself, according to the ad-tracking firm Medium Buying. Before founding his defense contracting business Pinnacle Solutions, Durant made headlines when his Special Forces helicopter was shot down by Somali militia, and he was held as a prisoner for 11 days.
Trump, a guiding light for the rural-working-class wing of the party, has also inserted himself as an unpredictable influence in the state. After Brooks spent much of 2020 warning of election theft by Democrats, the congressman ingratiated himself with Trump by helping to lead the effort to overturn the results and rally protesters to the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“Today is a time of choosing, and tomorrow is a time for fighting,” he said at the rally in an apparent call for organizing before the next election, before uttering words that his critics say helped encourage the violence at the Capitol he has since condemned. “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking a--,” he said. Trump’s endorsement came a few months later.
But trouble with Trump began in August, when the former president traveled to Cullman, Ala., for a rally that was supposed to be a boon for the Brooks campaign. At an event coinciding with the rally, Trump met Katie Britt and her husband, Wesley, a 6-foot-8 former offensive tackle with the New England Patriots. Trump came away impressed, gushing afterward about Wesley having played for the Patriots and in college for the Alabama Crimson Tide, according to three people who have spoken with Trump.
“He said she looks and sounds like a winner,” said one person familiar with the conversations, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private interaction.
Brooks compounded the new threat by announcing from the rally podium that his supporters should look past their anger at what he still contends was a stolen 2020 election. “Put that behind you,” he said, prompting the crowd to respond with boos and cries of “No!”
“All right, we’ll look back at it, but go forward and take advantage of it,” Brooks then said, backtracking. Trump, who has prioritized re-litigating the last election, made clear to those around him that he was not happy with Brooks’s inartful pitch.
After boasting that Brooks had far more than 50 percent of the primary vote in private polls, his advisers have since become far more somber, as other private surveys have showed Britt surging and Durant gaining attention. Britt raised $3.8 million through the end of September, with contributions from the political operations of Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and the recent appearance of Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) at one of her fundraisers. Durant, who got in the race only in October, has not yet disclosed how much he has committed to spend.
Brooks, by contrast, has struggled with money, despite the Trump imprimatur and the pledge of outside support from the Club for Growth. He raised only $1.8 million through the end of September, and in November he announced a shuffling of his campaign team.
Rather than resetting his relationship with Trump, the new team initially caused more tension, after Trump read news reports that noted it included Fred Davis, a former ad maker for the late senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), and campaign manager Forrest Barnwell-Hagemeyer, who had previously shared some Trump criticism on social media. (Barnwell-Hagemeyer countered the reports by saying he voted twice for Trump’s presidential campaign.)
“He read it, and he was furious,” one Trump confidant said of the former president’s reaction to the new staff.
Brooks supporters contend that the reports of Trump’s unease are overblown, pushed by anonymous sources. They point out that Trump has not backed away from Brooks publicly, describe friendly notes Brooks has received from the former president and mention continuing discussions to have members of Trump’s family, such as Donald Trump Jr., come to the state to campaign.
“This race is a battle between the America First conservative coalition that President Trump built, and the same, open borders, Big Government-Big Business coalition that has controlled D.C. for years, hates conservatives and hates President Trump,” Stanton McDonald, a Huntsville attorney who chairs Brooks’s campaign, said in a statement.
Terry Lathan, the former Alabama Republican Party chairwoman who is backing Brooks, said she still thinks it is just a matter of time before Republicans learn that her candidate has Trump’s support and unites behind him.
“Alabama is consistently the number-one-rated Trump state in the nation,” Lathan said. “I am watching people, and very often I am asked, ‘Who is Trump for?’ ”
Hanging over the entire contest is the memory of the chaotic 2017 special election primary for the state’s other Senate seat. In that contest, Trump and Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) backed the state’s former attorney general Luther Strange, who had been appointed to the vacant seat, for the Republican nomination over Brooks and former state Supreme Court judge Roy Moore.
Strange ran a lackluster campaign based largely on Trump’s endorsement. Brooks spent heavily on television ads attacking McConnell for his support of Strange, and a McConnell-backed group blistered Brooks with ads that featured Brooks’s criticism of Trump dating from the 2016 presidential campaign. The internal fights allowed Moore to win a primary runoff, only to lose later in the general election after accusations surfaced that he had initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old when he was in his 30s.
Brooks has so far avoided targeting McConnell directly in his current campaign, but his advisers declined to comment on the possibility of that changing in the coming months. Trump has been privately urging Republicans to turn publicly against their Senate leader, and Brooks dodged a direct question about whether he would support McConnell in a recent interview with Politico.
“I will support the candidate for Senate majority leader who is the most conservative and best reflects the values of Alabama citizens,” he said.
Britt meanwhile is trying to introduce herself to the state as a fresh face, outside the political maw, even as she rallies the state’s business community to her side. Shelby’s retirement will be a major shock to the state, which has grown accustomed to massive federal investments for infrastructure and its aerospace industry thanks to Shelby’s power. A 2020 report from the Officer of the New York State Comptroller found that Alabama gets the sixth-highest amount per capita of federal procurement dollars.
Britt has channeled this message by declaring that she would “put Alabama First” — a play on Trump’s “America First” message — “deliver results for our state and never apologize for it.” A former president of the Business Council of Alabama, she has received endorsements from a broad array of trade groups in the state, including organizations for farmers, manufacturers, retail business and auto dealers.
She has also made efforts to align herself with Trump’s policies, coming out against federal vaccination mandates for businesses, publicly supporting his border wall and disagreeing with McConnell’s decision to strike a compromise with Democrats over the debt ceiling.
Brooks has earned the ire of some groups by criticizing the rush for federal funding as not conservative, and he made headlines in 2020 by saying that the state’s farm lobby was “on the opposite side of America and on the side of the Chinese.” Britt and Brooks have also split on the question of the 2020 election. Whereas Brooks has long maintained falsely that Trump was the rightful victor, Britt has stopped short of such claims, arguing instead for new laws to protect “election integrity.”
Like Durant, she has cast herself as an outsider in the race, running against Brooks’s long record of elected leadership.
“He’s the Joe Biden of Alabama: 40 years running for office, six terms in Congress, and nothing to show for it but empty words and more money in his pocket,” Britt spokesman Sean Ross said in a statement. “It is clear that Alabamians are ready for fresh blood to shake things up, and that’s why he is in full meltdown mode.”
With months to go before a May 24 primary election — not to mention a potential June 21 runoff — the race still has a ways to run. Much will depend on how committed Trump chooses to be down the stretch to Brooks and on how the candidates perform in a state where retail politics can still matter.
“You are talking about the Republican primary electorate in Alabama, and that is a pretty yeasty mix,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University who studies Southern politics. “You never know what is going to come out of that.”
