Last Thursday, Congressman and candidate for the Alabama senate, Mo Brooks, took to the stand and said his opponents ‘will go negative’, referring to his strong lead ahead of the 2022 GOP race for Senate. Brooks spoke on the April 2021 poll by the conservative Club for Growth. This comes shortly after Katie Boyd Britt announced her run for Alabama Senate on Tuesday.
After Brooks made this statement, voices of the political arena stated they believe it is too early to make such a claim.
Brooks, during a visit to South Alabama on Thursday, said his Republican challengers – Katie Boyd Britt, the former president and CEO for the Business Council of Alabama; and Lynda Blanchard, a former ambassador to Slovenia under President Donald Trump – will have to go on the attack ahead of the May 24 Republican primary race to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby. The poll showed Brooks with a whopping 46-point lead, with 19 percent of voters undecided.
“When you have one person with 59 percent of the vote, and Candidates 2 and 3 at 13 and 9, they are pretty much boxed in to attack position,” said Brooks, referring to the Club for Growth poll that occurred on April 26-27, long before Britt announced her candidacy. “The only question is whether they will attack as Lynda Blanchard has or if they are going to attack indirectly through third-party groups so they can have some degree of plausible deniability.”
Brooks said his current standing among Alabama Republican voters is “scary good,” citing the Club for Growth polling, which said that 77 percent of respondents were not aware that Trump had endorsed the Huntsville Republican’s candidacy. The former president endorsed Brooks in early April.
Like Angi Horn Stalnaker of Montgomery, some GOP strategists noted that Club for Growth has a record of negative campaigning itself and that if it’s aligned with Brooks, it will be pushing out its own advertisements against Britt and Blanchard in the months ahead. Joe Kildea, a spokesman with Club for Growth, said the organization had not made an endorsement in the 2022 race.
With the 2022 Senate Election a year away, the polls have yet to accurately predict the outcome.
