Rep. Mo Brooks surges in Alabama GOP Senate primary race after Trump rescinded his endorsement

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Rep. Mo Brooks surges in Alabama GOP Senate primary race after Trump rescinded his endorsement
Republican Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama conducts a news conference in the Capitol Visitor Center on the Fire Fauci Act on Tuesday, June 15, 2021.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
  • Mo Brooks has surged in recent polling despite Trump rescinding his support of the GOP lawmaker.
  • In the latest Cygnal poll, Katie Britt led with 30.8% of the vote, with Brooks at 28.5 percent.
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Two months ago, former President Donald Trump rescinded his endorsement of conservative Rep. Mo Brooks' Senate bid, claiming that the longtime political ally went "woke" in saying that the party needed to look to the future.

At the time, Brooks was lagging in fundraising and his polling numbers had stalled in the Republican primary against former Business Council of Alabama president and CEO Katie Britt — who was endorsed by retiring GOP Sen. Richard Shelby — and former US Army pilot Michael Durant.

But Brooks has made a major rebound — a development that might have seemed improbable after Trump bailed on his onetime preferred candidate.

Alabama is one of the most deeply Republican states in the country, and Trump — who easily won the state in both 2016 and 2020 — retains a huge amount of goodwill among its huge swath of conservative voters.

However, despite Trump's snub of Brooks, the congressman finds himself near the top of the pack in the most recent polling for the race.

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If no candidate receives over 50 percent of the vote in Tuesday's primary, which most observers feel is the likeliest outcome, then the top two vote-getters will advance to a June 21 runoff.

Britt has been a polling leader in recent months, with the latest survey conducted by Cygnal and commissioned on behalf of Alabama Daily News and Gray Television showing her ahead with 30.8 percent of the vote. However, Brooks is not far behind, with 28.5 percent of the vote; Durant comes in third place, garnering 24.3 percent of the vote.

The poll, which surveyed 634 likely GOP primary voters in the Republican primary and had a margin of error of 3.88 percent, also revealed that 6.4 percent of respondents opted for another candidate while 10 percent of respondents were undecided.

In a March Cygnal poll, Durant came out on top, with 34.6 percent of support from respondents, with Britt in second place at 28.4 percent and Brooks in a distant third place, garnering support from 16.1 percent of respondents.

The latest Emerson College poll showed Britt in the lead with the support of 32 percent of respondents, with Durant at 26.4 percent and Brooks at 25.1 percent, with 14 percent of respondents undecided.

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In an Emerson survey from March, Brooks only registered with 12 percent support, which shows that the congressman has more than doubled his support since that time.

Despite the very public Trump rejection, Brooks continues to repeat unsubstantiated claims that there was election fraud in the 2020 presidential race.

He also has continued to call for the ouster of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky as the leader of the party's caucus.

And his focus on immigration issues and election integrity continue to endear him to many voters who have been unrelenting in their support of Trump.

While speaking with The New York Times, Brooks called Durant "a John McCain-type of Republican" and branded Britt as "a Mitch McConnell-establishment, open-borders, cheap-foreign-labor, special-interest-group Republican."

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"Slowly but surely, conservatives are figuring out I'm the only conservative in this race," he added.

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