There’s an election primary next week, and many of the candidates vying for the Republican nomination in Alabama want you to know one thing: They like Donald Trump.
If you watch the political TV and radio commercials airing in Alabama’s five major media markets, you will learn these GOP candidates go beyond just supporting our Republican president. They campaigned for him, wore clothes with his emblem on them, displayed his yard signs, attended his rallies and did everything imaginable to make sure Trump and not Hillary Clinton won Alabama’s nine votes in the Electoral College.
And their opponents – maybe they supported Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio — or worse, they abandoned him on the “Access Hollywood” Billy Bush weekend.
It is clear the conventional wisdom on the streets of Alabama says that going all-in on Donald Trump is how you will win next Tuesday in the Republican primary.
That begs the question – how was this notion invented? Were some consultants in Washington, D.C. spit-balling ideas, and said, “Donald Trump won pretty big there in 2016. He’s almost as popular as the Crimson Tide in that state.”
It is true that Donald Trump won big, and it is likely true that his approval rating within the borders of Alabama is much higher than it is nationwide. But we’re at the point in this primary cycle that if everyone is Donald Trump, then no one is Donald Trump.
People are only going to buy into that notion once or twice at most, right? You can’t expect voters to believe that a vote for candidate x in the gubernatorial, lieutenant gubernatorial, attorney general, U.S. House of Representatives and all the other offices is just like a vote for President Donald J. Trump.
There’s also no evidence this works.
Last year, the hypothesis that the most pro-Trump candidate would win was tested on three occasions in Alabama. In two of those occasions, the Republican U.S. senatorial election runoff, and the U.S. Senate, the Trump-endorsed candidates Luther Strange and Roy Moore lost big. They lost so big that neither is even relevant in Alabama politics anymore.
Obviously, other circumstances led to both Strange and Moore’s defeats in 2017. However, the point is that Donald Trump was not some magic elixir for statewide election success.
It is a bit of an odd phenomenon for Alabama to have local GOP candidates so eager to claim the mantle of the sitting president. It was never the case during the George W. Bush years. Bush remained popular in Alabama throughout his presidency. But candidates were never running with being the most Bush-esque as a centerpiece of their campaign.
In the case of the two Republican presidents before that, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Alabama was going Republican in national elections and Democratic in almost everything else down-ballot. There wasn’t as much of an opportunity to ride the coattails of the incumbent Republican president.
Many of the candidates running as close to Donald Trump as possible will likely have a good showing on Election Day. What you’ll want to watch for is if they keep pounding the Trump drum beyond the July runoffs and up to the general election.
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and is the editor of Breitbart TV.
