AL-Sen, FL-01: In a story so strange we actually had to check to make sure it wasn’t posted on April Fools’ Day, The Hill’s Scott Wong reports that Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in considering seeking the GOP Senate nod in … Alabama.
Wong writes that Gaetz, who is one of Donald Trump’s most obnoxious allies in the House (and yes, we are grading on a curve here), reportedly told House colleagues as recently as Thursday he was thinking about challenging Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, who is the most vulnerable Senate Democrat up in 2020. Unnamed sources close to Gaetz, who represents a safely red seat on the border Alabama, also say that “people in Trump's orbit” are encouraging him to carpetbag.
Gaetz himself didn’t rule out running when asked on Thursday. Instead, he merely said he “had a few people make mention to me that Alabama has a very short residency requirement” while insisting “it’s not something I’ve looked at myself.” (There’s no residency requirement to run for the Senate; you only need to be a resident at the time of election.) The congressman concluded, “I think that my most likely path would be to seek re-election in the House.”
However, Gaetz made it clear just days ago that he wasn’t exactly happy where he was (we mean in the House, not in Florida), telling Buzzfeed, “This place sucks,” and that he didn’t “know how I’d fit into this place in the absence of the president.” Still, Gaetz doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to escape Congress, saying he “wake[s] up every day and I do what I can to expose what I believe is an intractable bias among the people who are investigating the president.”
There’s already a congressman running for the GOP nod to take on Jones, and unlike Gaetz, he actually represents Alabama. However, plenty of anti-establishment groups like the radical anti-tax Club for Growth are not fond of Rep. Bradley Byrne, a longtime politician from the Mobile area, and they’ve been calling for someone to oppose him. So far, the Club has focused on trying to recruit either Reps. Mo Brooks or Gary Palmer who, we should make clear, also represent Alabama.
If Gaetz actually did run in the Yellowhammer State, he actually would start with some name recognition. Florida’s 1st Congressional District, which Gaetz won in 2016, is almost entirely located in the Mobile media market, so he has appeared on Alabamians TV screens along the Gulf Coast. However, only about 15% of Alabama is in the Mobile market, so Gaetz would still be a blank face to most of his would-be constituents. That would, of course, change if Trump actually endorsed a Gaetz for Alabama Senate campaign like his allies think could happen, and that would hardly be the strangest tweet to come out of the White House.
Several bona fide Alabama Republicans have been considering running. The Hill adds that a new name that’s been “floated in recent days” is Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach. Tuberville talked about running for governor last cycle but ultimately stayed out, and there’s no word if he’s interested in a Senate bid.
P.S. If Gaetz actually got elected to the Senate in one state while already representing another in the House, he would make history. The only two times this has happened in American history were when Virginia Rep. John Brown was elected senator from the new state of Kentucky in 1792, and when Massachusetts Rep. John Holmes won a Senate seat in the new state of Maine in 1820.
Of course, current and former elected officials in this day and age still do parachute across state lines to run for higher office, as Massachusetts Gov.-turned-Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Massachusetts Sen.-turned-failed New Hampshire Senate candidate Scott Brown can attest.