(June 30) MOBILE, Alabama — There’s a new U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, Katie Boyd Britt, who is a political consultant’s dream. In the next year, we’ll see if she can ride the winds of, or perhaps transcend, the new, Trump-ized political culture.
Britt was here in this coastal city June 25 for the second time already since announcing for the Senate just 17 days earlier, after energetically traversing this territorially substantial state from corner to corner several times — all while also in the midst of two out-of-state trips driving her children, rising sixth and seventh graders, to out of state athletic events and “Christian-based” summer camps.
Nobody who has watched Britt’s career in Alabama for the past 20 years will be surprised at her work ethic. It alone makes her a formidable candidate for the seat of retiring six-term senator Richard Shelby, Britt’s former boss — even though former president Trump, always wildly popular in Alabama, endorsed U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks for the seat months before Britt entered the race.
Brooks has been in public office (sometimes elected, sometimes appointed) since way back in 1982, which is the same year Britt was born. Yet if resumes are your thing, Britt at age 39 already has one that is boffo. As a high school student from Alabama’s wiregrass region, she was the national runner-up in what was then known as America’s Junior Miss (now “Distinguished Young Women”), a national college-scholarship-award program hosted here in Mobile whose famous alumni include TV journalists Diane Sawyer and Deborah Norville. In college, Britt was student government president at the 19,000-student University of Alabama, where campus politics are famously feisty.
Britt served on Shelby’s staff, rising to press secretary, before leaving to get a law degree…. Britt left Shelby again after two years to become president and CEO of the Business Council of Alabama, one of the most powerful forces in state government, where in 29 months she reportedly erased a $600,000 deficit from a $3.7 million budget while refocusing the organization from its big-business reputation to a facilitator (and, during the pandemic, sometimes savior) for small businesses across the state. …. [For the rest of this column, please follow this link.]
