AL-Sen: On Wednesday, candidate filing closed in Alabama for this year’s special election for the final years of Jeff Sessions’ Senate term, and Al.com has a list of candidates here. Both parties will hold their primaries on Aug. 15, and in contests where no one takes a majority of the vote, there will be a runoff Sept. 26. The general election will be held Dec. 12, and the winner will be up for re-election in 2020.
On the GOP side, there were a few very late developments before filing closed. State Rep. Ed Henry, who announced he would run hours after the special was moved from 2018 to 2017, ended up bowing out of the race and ripping up his qualifying papers. Henry did take some shots at appointed Sen. Luther Strange, who is running for the rest of Sessions’ term, on his way out.
However, state Sen. Trip Pittman decided to launch a campaign just after state Senate leader Del Marsh revealed that he wouldn’t run. Pittman, a Gulf Coast politician who had already decided not to run for re-election to the legislature, argued that unlike the rest of the field, he’s a “successful businessman.” This is going to be a very expensive contest, and Pittman likely will need to be willing and able to do so serious self-funding if he wants to break through.
Right now, it looks like there will be three major GOP candidates in the August primary. Strange, a former state attorney general who was appointed this year to the Senate by the disgraced now-former GOP Gov. Robert Bentley, has the support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and McConnell’s well-funded allied super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, has pledged to spend heavily for him in the primary. However, Strange pissed off plenty of local Republicans over the last few months: Strange's attorney general’s office was investigating Bentley for covering up a sex scandal, and his decision to take a job from the governor infuriated plenty of people who felt the whole affair looked dirty. Strange didn’t help things by arguing that he may not actually be investigating Bentley, a charade he kept up until he was in D.C.
Strange’s best-known primary opponent is likely ex-state Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore. Moore has a following with Alabama’s many social conservatives going back to 2003, when he was kicked off the bench for refusing to comply with a federal judge's order to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the grounds of the state Supreme Court. Moore won back his old post in 2012, and last year, he was permanently suspended after he told state probate judges that they "have a ministerial duty not to issue any marriage license contrary" to Alabama's defunct law banning same-sex marriage. Moore has a bad relationship with business groups over some of his rulings, which could hamper his fundraising, but his name recognition may be strong enough to get him at least to the runoff.
The third major GOP candidate is Rep. Mo Brooks, who represents a seat around the Huntsville area. Brooks has been a hard-core tea partier in the House, and in his campaign kickoff, he once again argued that Democrats were waging a “war on whites.” Brooks may end up competing for the same sort of anti-establishment voters as Moore, though Brooks doesn’t have the same sort of ties to religious conservatives. However, Brooks does have money. At the end of March, Brooks led Strange $1.18 million to $764,000 in cash-on-hand, though McConnell and friends will likely do all they can to help the appointed incumbent raise money.
According to Brooks himself, he begins the campaign as the underdog. Brooks recently said that according to his own poll (which he didn’t release to the public), Moore was in first place with about 30 percent of the vote, Strange had about 20, Brooks was in the low double digits. A few days ago, Politico reported that Brooks was hoping that Strange and Marsh would hurt each other enough to allow him and Moore to advance to the runoff, but Marsh’s decision not to run may have dramatically changed that calculus.
Besides Pittman, there are a few other GOP candidates who may have an impact on this race. Randy Brinson recently stepped down as head of the Christian Coalition of Alabama to run. Brinson may be able to eat into Moore’s religious conservative base, though infighting between different social conservative groups could hurt Brinson. Businessmen Dom Gentile and Bryan Peeples are also in, though it’s far from clear if they have the personal money or connections to run a serious race. Gentile recently said he planned to self-fund, but we’ll need to see if he can write himself a big enough check to get his name out.
Alabama is one of the most GOP-friendly states in the nation, and Democrats will have a very tough time winning the December general. However, GOP infighting and Trump’s scandals could give Team Blue at least a shot to make things interesting. The most notable Democratic candidate is lawyer Doug Jones, who served as U.S. attorney from 1997 to 2001. Jones is best known for successfully prosecuting two members of the Ku Klux Klan for the murder of four girls who were killed when the Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, an act Martin Luther King Jr. called "one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity."
Seven other Democrats are running, and none of them appear to have much name recognition or connections. However, one of those contenders just happens to be named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy doesn’t appear to have any relationship to the famous political family, but if Jones doesn’t put enough effort into winning the primary, it’s possible that voters will gravitate toward Kennedy’s recognizable name.