Republican Sen. Richard Shelby announced Monday that he would not seek a seventh term next year in Alabama, a decision that will likely set off a competitive GOP nomination fight in this dark red state. Most politicos had anticipated that the 86-year-old Shelby, who had switched to the Republican Party in 1994 after spending nearly eight years in the Senate as a Democrat, would retire, and the Associated Press reported days earlier that the incumbent was indeed telling people this was his plan.
Shelby’s decision ends a long career in Yellowhammer State politics as a member of both parties. Shelby got his start in elected office when he was elected to the state Senate as a conservative Democrat in 1970, a year where the long-dominant party still controlled every seat in the chamber.
Shelby then sought a promotion in 1978 when he campaigned for the open 7th Congressional District, which at the time included part of the Birmingham area and Tuscaloosa and had the highest proportion of Black residents of any of the state’s seven House seats. Shelby ended up winning the Democratic primary runoff 59-41 against state Rep. Chris McNair, whose daughter was one of the four Black girls murdered in 1963 when Ku Klux Klan members bombed Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and he had no trouble in the general election.
Shelby got his chance to run for the Senate in 1986 when Republican incumbent Jeremiah Denton was up for re-election. Denton, who had been one of the highest-ranking officers to become a POW during the Vietnam War, had made history six years before when he became the first Republican to win a seat in the upper chamber since Reconstruction, but he was vulnerable in a state where conservative Democrats still remained the dominant political faction.
Shelby narrowly managed to win the Democratic nomination without a runoff, but he began the race as the heavy underdog against Denton; one poll even showed the incumbent ahead by 25 points. Shelby, though, spent heavily on ads arguing, “Denton votes to cut your Social Security ... And give it to illegal aliens.” Shelby also ran more commercials featuring a clip of Denton saying, “I can't be down here patting babies on the butt and get that done in Washington.”
The congressman, for his part, called himself “a fiscal conservative” in his own messaging, which prominently featured a picture of him with President Ronald Reagan. Shelby ended up unseating Denton by a narrow 50.3-49.7, a victory that coincided with Democrats retaking the Senate after six years, even as Alabama was electing its first GOP governor in over a century.
Shelby was one of a number of conservative Democrats in the Senate when he was first elected, and for a time this suited him just fine. In 1987, Shelby joined with his party to vote down Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, saying, “There’s a perception in Alabama—from a lot of whites as well as Blacks—that Bork could bring an unsettling effect to the court.” Four years later, though, Shelby was one of 11 Democrats to confirm Clarence Thomas.
Shelby’s old rival Chris McNair challenged Shelby for renomination from the left in 1992, but the incumbent won 61-28. Shelby then went on to win his general election 65-33 as George H.W. Bush was beating Bill Clinton in the state 48-41, a result that marked the last time a Democrat won a Senate seat in Alabama until Doug Jones’ 2017 special election victory.
Shelby would then spend the first two years of the Clinton administration as one of the new president’s fiercest intra-party critics. In 1993, Shelby used a meeting with Vice President Al Gore to denounce the White House’s budget goals as, “[h]igh on taxes, low on [spending] cuts,” and he repeatedly voted against the Clinton agenda. The administration would also announce in 1993 that it was transferring 90 major NASA jobs from Huntsville to Texas in what was perceived to be retaliation for Shelby’s loud attempts to undermine Clinton.
Shelby denied speculation that he was thinking of changing parties well into the fall of 1994, but he did just that one day after that year’s elections gave the GOP control of both chambers of Congress. The senator explained his defection, “I thought if there was room in the Democratic Party for a conservative southern Democrat such as myself representing my people from Alabama and other areas in the South, but I can tell you there is not. There is not room.”
Shelby’s new party embraced him, and he had no trouble winning his first campaign as a Republican in 1998. Shelby himself proved to usually be a loyal Republican as well, and he rose to claim a number of senior posts on powerful committees. A few other members of Congress would switch parties after Shelby, but he would outlast most of them: The only other member of the 117th Congress who would change party labels while in D.C. was New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a fellow Democrat-turned-independent.
In 2016, Shelby faced his first notable opposition in some time in the form of Marine veteran Jonathan McConnell, but the primary challenger struggled to gain traction. Shelby did earn the wrong type of attention thanks to a very badly edited ad where the part on his hair appeared to switch sides on his head, but this continuity error didn’t stop him from winning renomination 64-28.