Alabama U.S. Senate race newcomer Mike Durant continued his attacks on front-runner Mo Brooks late last week in a series of radio interviews, saying that Brooks can’t win the seat and has stayed too long.
Durant, a former Army helicopter pilot and POW from Huntsville, said during radio interviews in Huntsville and Montgomery that his biggest issue with Brooks is his lack of consistency.
“I mean, he changes horses every day,” Durant said on Huntsville’s WVNN. “He was against President Trump strongly. And now, you know, all of a sudden, you know, he’s pro-President Trump only because it advances his political agenda, not because that’s what he believes.”
Durant also pointed out that Brooks doesn’t seem to be very popular with Alabama voters statewide, as evidenced by his lackluster history in winning statewide races. In the 2017 special election for U.S. Senate, Brooks finished a distant third to Roy Moore and Luther Strange, getting less than 20 percent of the vote.
Durant also pointed out that Trump’s endorsement doesn’t seem to mean much in Alabama.
“You know, when Mo ran for the Senate seat in 2017, he was polled out front and ended up coming in third,” Durant said. “The person who had President Trump’s endorsement didn’t win either: either in the primary or in the general. … Mo is not going to get to 50 percent.”
Brooks never polled out front in that 2017 race — at best, he was statistically even with Moore on a few occasions — and his finish was fairly in line with the polling. Still, Brooks, who, like Moore, is a very polarizing candidate, seems to be popular only with a devoted following — roughly 20 percent of Republican voters in the state — and those numbers don’t fluctuate much.
Current polling that shows Brooks with a large lead is very soft, and obviously built on Brooks’ name recognition following the Jan. 6 insurrection that he reportedly helped incite. Some 50 percent of the GOP voting base remains undecided in the race.
Durant is hoping that those voters will penalize Brooks for his lengthy career in office.
“I would recognize the fact that this is not meant to be a lifelong occupation,” Durant said during the WVNN interview. “It was intended to be something you got in, spent a reasonable amount of time doing.”
“I mean, everyone I have talked to agrees there should be term limits,” Durant continued. “He’s well beyond that, no matter how you define term limits. You know, there’s a lot of comments that I’ve seen on his political career that pretty much focus on ‘it’s time for him to go.’”
