(March 16) 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…. [The full column is at this link.]
