Alabama’s Katie Britt spreads optimism in hyper-energetic Senate race | #republicans | #Alabama | #GOP

MOBILE, Alabama — Katie Britt, Alabama’s Republican nominee for a Senate seat, isn’t even in office yet, but she already is acting like quite the team player.

Britt is in a weird sort of 140-day limbo wherein most people assume she’s a de facto senator-elect, but she faces a Nov. 8 general election against a credible Democratic opponent. At a Tuesday campaign event here in this port city, Britt showed the same sort of apparently inexhaustible and focused energy that brought her back from a 58-percentage-point polling deficit all the way to the nomination.

Although she is a prohibitive favorite against Democrat Will Boyd, a leading black-church pastor with three doctorates to his credit, Britt continues crisscrossing the state as if she must earn every vote in a one-on-one conversation.

As she said, she is “not taking anything for granted and reminding people that Joe Biden’s agenda is on the ballot on Nov. 8” and that it must be defeated. “I’m going to leave everything on the field. That’s the way I was brought up. That’s the way I do things.”

Yet, as she said to me just before her event began, “I’ve also had the opportunity to meet and be a part of trying to help other candidates across the country. It is incredibly important that we [Republicans] not only take back the House, but take back the Senate.”

During the event, she became passionate, her voice cracking a little, describing one Senate race that hasn’t garnered as much national attention as some others, but may well be an upset pickup opportunity for Republicans.

“Tiffany Smiley in Washington [State]: I want y’all to watch her,” she said. “The latest poll that came out had her within two of [Democrat] Patty Murray. So, Patty Murray has been there for 30-something years. I was on a panel with Tiffany. For those of you who are not familiar with her story, her husband stepped on an IED there in Iraq and lost his vision. She took on the VA and the military and said, ‘My husband has more to give.’ He became the very first blind serviceman ever to serve in our military and served for 10 more years.”

Then came the emotional payoff: “When she was sitting on that stage and someone said, ‘Why are you doing this?’, she said, ‘Let me tell you this: My husband has never and will never see my three boys, and I will not allow that sacrifice to be in vain.’”

And then Britt was off on another tear about how “that’s the kind of people we need, people who believe in this country, people who believe in our military, believe in our values, and are willing to fight for them.”

When she is not touting fellow Republican candidates, Britt is, as described previously, a font of a flurry of words zipping back and forth between national and local priorities while, unlike some candidates, actually explaining how they link together and weaving in well-researched statistics. And if challenged to turn her conservative thematic goals into examples of actual legislation she would push, she refers the questioner to her series of op-ed pieces with markedly detailed legislative proposals — such as the one on restraining taxes and spending that lists eight specific bills she will introduce to eliminate the Department of Education, eliminate “unauthorized spending” (federal budget-speak that actually means something), and so on.

Throughout, Britt’s tone is one of great concern tempered by even greater expressions of can-do hope. It’s a tone that more conservatives and Republicans need to rediscover.