Behind-The-Scenes With U.S. Senate Candidate Mike Durant

TUSCALOOSA, AL — A faint voice echoed from down an otherwise quiet hallway in the Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Office Wednesday morning followed by the footsteps of an older, bespectacled deputy in a tan uniform wanting to speak to Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Durant.

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The 60-year-old war hero and conservative political outsider was on an unannounced campaign stop in Tuscaloosa as he seeks the GOP nomination in a hotly-contested Senate race and invited Patch to be a guest on the visit. Getting his attention, Durant stopped to chat.

I could read the deputy's face and body language enough to tell he did not want a reporter or anyone else around to hear what he had to say to Durant, so I moseyed back down the hall, pretending to look at the different photos on the wall.

It was quiet, though, and I couldn't help but eavesdrop.

"Maybe this just isn't your year," I distinctly remember him saying, looking down slightly at the shorter Durant and providing a searing critique.

Durant's response was surprisingly measured for a man who says "Joe Biden starts making bad decisions from the moment he wakes up in the morning" to referring to COVID-19 as the "China Virus."

He stood flat-footed and stoic, hands on his hips. Very much in the way of a soldier, he took the criticism in stride and diligently listened to the deputy. After all, it's worth noting for those unaware that this man endured a hellish 11 days as a prisoner of war in Somalia — an experience portrayed by Ron Eldard in the 2001 Jerry Bruckheimer film "Black Hawk Down."

After Durant finished his conversation with the deputy and our group made our way up a staircase in the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse a short time later, he spoke of the realities one must face when running for such a visible office like the U.S. Senate and trying to connect with voters on a local level.

"You just can't appeal to everybody, " he said. "All I can do is educate them on why I'm the right choice. I can explain what makes me different, because I am different. I'm the non-political outsider, just like Tuberville or Trump, and that appeals to the majority of voters in Alabama. But you’re never going to get 100% of the vote."

Indeed, Durant has his work cut out for him in the downhill run to the GOP primary on May 24, as he is currently running third in most polls behind first-time candidate Katie Britt and Republican Congressman Mo Brooks to fill the Senate seat that will soon be vacated by longtime U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby. This is the same spot Durant also occupies in terms of fundraising, although he says his campaign has picked up steam in recent weeks.

However, Durant's presence alone in the race is likely to have an impact, even if he doesn't win.

With respect to splitting the vote and sending the race to a runoff, this would make his support a valuable commodity if his name does not appear on the ticket. This becomes an even stronger possibility when looking at 16.6% of respondents in one December poll expressing support for the decorated Army pilot, as previously reported by Al.com.

And as the intensity heats up in TV campaign ads and old scandals surface, Durant has found himself in an uphill battle to stand out in a crowded field. This includes weathering past controversies brought to light by the reporting of Bill Britt and Josh Moon of Alabama Political Reporter, who reference past Associated Press stories where Durant accused his sister of lying about years of sexual abuse at the hands of their father.

The bad publicity no doubt dealt a setback to his still-fledgling campaign, but Durant continues to criss-cross the state in an effort to keep recent momentum rolling into the spring.

Durant — an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump's conservative agenda — is also not without his supporters in Tuscaloosa and west Alabama, as evidenced on Wednesday when he made his way from office to office, shaking hands and posing for pictures with a range of surprised public servants.

While Durant's time was limited to a short window, Tuscaloosa Patch followed along, grabbing candid soundbites here and there to paint a behind-the-scenes look at Durant on the campaign trail.

'The Ground War'

I would be remiss if I did not mention retired Tuscaloosa County Sheriff's Deputy Mickey Pate, a respected figure in local law enforcement who served as our tour guide through the sheriff's office and county courthouse on Wednesday.

The boisterous and jovial retiree joked loudly with each passing deputy we met, but his voice would then change to a softer, more serious tone as he encouraged those he met to speak with the silver-haired man standing behind him. In some of the interactions, he would hand them glossy campaign leaflets.

"He's one of the finest men you'll ever meet and he could sure use your vote," Pate said on more than one occasion.

In a brief phone conversation after our tour, Pate called me to sing Durant's praises further, pointing to his "outsider" status as being one that could truly benefit the state of Alabama.

"We need people like him in Washington," he said.

Durant wore a casual blue dress shirt, khakis and LL Bean sunglasses when he first got out of a big dark Jeep Rubicon to speak with me on the corner of 8th Street and Lurleen B. Wallace Boulevard in downtown Tuscaloosa before our tour began. When I asked him about the concerns on the minds of voters in Tuscaloosa, specifically, he mentioned the economy and border security — both longstanding platform issues in Alabama.

"We've been here many times," Durant told me of Tuscaloosa. "Several of my kids went to school here, so we're pretty familiar with the town. I've always enjoyed my trips here and going to football games. We’re in what we call the 'Ground War' right now. We've been on the air for two or three months now and I’m getting to as many places in the state as I can to meet people and understand what the issues are from their perspective. That's the only way to know what’s important for the voters."

The owner of Huntsville-based Pinnacle Solutions, his aerospace company has major domestic and international contracts with, among others, the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Boeing Sikorsky Aircraft Support.

Durant says as an employer, he has been faced with the same range of challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the economy. But one of the primary challenges that he said can also be heard in the demands of voters in Tuscaloosa focuses on one major side-effect of pandemic economics.

"From a business perspective, what I hear from all people across the state is a labor shortage," he said. "We can not find people to fill jobs."

Even before he had gotten out of his Jeep, he told me, he had been on a teleconference about the subject of ongoing labor shortages.

When I asked what his plan would be to fix such a pervasive and complex problem, Durant pointed first to the idea of incorporating "stay interviews."

In a November 2021 article by CNBC entitled "Why the ‘stay interview’ is the next big trend of the Great Resignation," it tells the story of a concept that isn't new by any stretch, but one that employers are increasingly incorporating as they look to address retention.

"When your people are already onboard, talk to them about their job. What do they like? What can we do to make this better for them? So they don’t want to leave," Durant said. "Historically, companies have all done exit interviews, but at that point it's too late. But statistics show that if you talk to somebody four weeks before they go to somewhere else, you’ve got a 78% chance of keeping them. Turnover costs, which we came up with just as an industry number, if we turned over 100 people last year, the cost of that turnover is $1.5 million."

Durant then stressed the importance of understanding the "cultural differences" in whatever age group you’re targeting in the hiring process.

"Younger people good or bad, they just view work differently than they did when I had to work," he said. "We need to offer great benefits, great compensation and just making employees feel valued because they are valuable. It would be great to create a focus group specifically addressing this issue. Because it might be different for the manager of one place than it would for another."

As for border security, Durant has been a vocal proponent for the completion of a "border wall" along the country's southern border with Mexico, in addition to opposing any pathway to citizenship that "rewards law breakers and would deport illegals back to their country of origin, forcing them to come here through legal channels."

Other expressed, lower priority platform issues issues we did not have the time to cover include his opposition to vaccine and mask mandates, big tech censorship, overturning Roe v. Wade to ban abortion and supporting the Second Amendment.

Above all else, though — considering it is the very first talking point mentioned on his campaign website — is an allegiance to former president Donald Trump.

"Mike Durant is 100% Pro-Trump," his platform reads. "He voted for President Trump twice, and he supports the America First agenda. He wants to build a wall on the southern border. He wants to get tougher with China on trade. And Mike believes we need an investigation into the way the Democrats changed the rules of the 2020 election so what happened never happens again."

While the Trump agenda remains his central focus, it's worth pointing out that the 45th president was never really discussed in the open on the brief campaign stop in Tuscaloosa.

Instead, Durant seemed focused on casting himself as a man of the people, ready to listen to their concerns at a local level.

In the county courthouse as the tour wrapped up, when popping in to say hello to those in the finance department, Durant stood in a hallway and answered one county official who brought up how his recent momentum on the campaign had brought the candidate more visibility.

"I wouldn't want to get in and not affect the race," Durant laughed. "But we're doing great. I don't have a career in politics. I was in the military for 22 years, had my own business for the last 14 years, so I understand the whole financial side of things. But that's what I want to bring to this. We need people with real world experience that impact how we do as a society."

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This article originally appeared on the Tuscaloosa Patch