Race for U.S. Senate seat enters stretch run | INSIDE THE STATEHOUSE

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Steve Flowers
Steve Flowers

The May 24 GOP primary is less than two weeks away. It has been an interesting and expensive race to fill the seat held by Richard Shelby, our venerable and powerful senior senator.

There are three major primary contestants. Katie Britt, Mike Durant and Mo Brooks are the horses or, as some might say combatants, given the prevalence of negative advertising.

Two of these three gladiators will be the recipient of the most votes on that momentous day and will face off in a runoff set for six weeks after the primary. The winner of that June 21 runoff will be our next U.S. senator. Winning the GOP primary is tantamount to election for a statewide office in the Heart of Dixie, especially for a U.S. Senate race.

This race will probably wind up being the most expensive race in Alabama political history, especially when you add up the third-party expenditures.

In modern-day national politics, a candidate’s individual war chest is not the telling story. We live in a world of third party political action committees (PACs). These third-party PACs, based in Washington, D.C., have spent more on their preferred candidate than has been spent directly by the candidates’ campaigns.

These PACs are not supposed to coordinate with their preferred candidate, but they do. They share all information and polling, and script their attack ads based on what they think you want to hear. These innocuous PACs have the meanest hired guns, who relish negative ads and seek to destroy their opposition. Why? Because negative ads work.

The other political adage that has never changed is that money is the mother’s milk of politics. These three candidates possess or have received plenty of campaign resources, mostly from out of state. Allow me to summarize the top three U.S. Senate candidates, as well as their benefactors, their positions and potential.

Brooks is backed by the Club for Growth. This group wants less government and free trade with China. These very rich folks and Brooks are made for each other. They have been tied to the hip during Brooks’ entire 11-year career in Congress.

The Club for Growth wants a senator who will have total disregard for their state or district and have total allegiance to their laissez-faire pro-China trade agenda. That is why Brooks has voted against the needs of his district and Alabama. He has actually voted against agriculture and military defense spending, which are the mainstays of Alabama.

Brooks has dropped dramatically in the polls since the race began this time last year. He will now probably finish a distant third. When the race first began and it looked like Brooks might be a player, John Kennedy, the popular, wise and witty Republican senator from Louisiana, quipped, “A Senate seat is a terrible thing to waste.”

The runoff will probably be a Durant vs. Britt contest.

The wild card in this race has been Durant, who nobody saw coming. He is the perfect prototype candidate for winning an open U.S. Senate seat, especially in a pro-military state like Alabama. Durant is a war hero, a former Prisoner of War, and started his own military defense business.

He has spent some of his own money, but has been extensively backed by a national liberal group called the “More Perfect Union PAC.” The founder and major benefactor, Jake Harriman, is striving to elect more moderates, including Democrats and Republicans. This PAC wants “Republicans in Name Only” (RINOs). Therefore, RINO probably is the more accurate description of Durant.

Durant is a phantom candidate, who has run primarily a media campaign revealing he was shot down as a helicopter pilot over 40 years ago.

If the term carpetbagger ever applied in modern day Alabama politics, it applies to Durant. He has barely campaigned in Alabama and he probably knows very few Alabamians. He hails from New Hampshire, but prefers his palatial home in Colorado.

A vote for Durant is like a pig in a poke, you do not know what you will be getting. However, you would be getting a person who decided he wanted to be a United States senator, but does not care which state you put behind his name: New Hampshire, Colorado or Alabama.

With Durant running a slick television-only campaign and not discussing issues, nobody knows where he stands. The one group that is extremely skeptical and apprehensive of him are the Second Amendment, gun-owning National Rifle Association members of our state.

Britt is the mainstream conservative, pro-business candidate who understands Alabama and our needs. Most of her campaign contributions have come from Alabamians. In fact, she is the only real Alabamian in the race.

Steve Flowers served 16 years in the Alabama Legislature. Readers can email him at steve@steveflowers.us.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Race for U.S. Senate seat enters stretch run| INSIDE THE STATEHOUSE