New mailers arrived in mailboxes around Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District last week. They’re attack ads, paid for by a Donald Trump-aligned super PAC and targeted at incumbent Democrat Shomari Figures.
But something’s missing.
Oh, the ad has all of the usual right-wing racism and lying, including a doctored photo of Figures in which he appears to have a fang. There’s also the overall tone-deafness of a mailer sent out by the party of Trump attempting to target someone else for “supporting corruption.” (The premise of the ad is based on Figures voting against some “anti-corruption” legislation that Republicans were pushing. Of course, that legislation also included the SAVE Act regulations on elections and failed to include the president in its crackdown on corruption. So, yeah, more election season nonsense from the party of data centers and government expansion.)
Noticeably absent from the mailer, however, is one thing: Donald Trump.
It’s weird, because Figures’ challenger, Rhett Marques, has up to this point been quite the fan of the president, repeatedly referring to himself in ads that ran through August as “the America First fighter that President Trump trusts.”
But times, it seems, are a-changing.
Marques appears to be one of a number of Republicans locked in tight races who are suddenly abandoning Trump. Pretending that they haven’t been enablers of the self-dealing, felony-committing commander in chief.
In Florida alone, everyone from gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds to Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar to state House candidate Mike Beltran has tried to get away from Trump. Donalds removed numerous references to Trump from his campaign website. Salazar is now openly criticizing Trump’s immigration policies.
Mike Rogers, running against Abdul El-Sayed in a Michigan Senate race, has this week started criticizing Trump’s foreign policy, slamming the approach to the Iran war.
Two Iowa reps broke from the party and backed a resolution to curb Trump’s war powers.
In Alabama, the move away from Trump has been less obvious, but it’s still happening. All of a sudden, like with the mailers attacking Figures, Trump’s name and image are mysteriously absent. On the campaign trail, many Republican state lawmakers who are in competitive races have suddenly stopped talking about how much they love Trump, how they’re endorsed by Trump, how voters should elect them to protect the Trump agenda.
As Trump toyed last week with the idea of holding a rally in Alabama this week, the news landed for many Alabama Republicans like an invitation to a wedding on a football Saturday. As one Republican lawmaker told me: “No one wants this. But for (Trump), it’s about (Trump). Always.”
That one lawmaker wasn’t alone. In numerous conversations, the idea of a Trump rally ranged from turd-in-a-punchbowl unpopular to grin-and-bear-it tolerable. And it’s not hard to understand why.
Things are bad right now for Republicans, and for a change, that includes Alabama. Voters are angry, and there’s no one to blame for the current mess of the economy other than the party that controls all three branches of government. That goes double for Alabama, where Republicans have, for more than a decade and a half now, held a supermajority in both houses and controlled every statewide office.
If you’re a Republican candidate running for anything and talking about “fixing” stuff, the natural response from voters is: “Aren’t you the ones who broke all of the stuff?”
Take gas prices, for example.
Rhetoric aside, the average person knows full-well that Trump and his incredibly dumb war in Iran—a war he promised repeatedly not to start, by the way—is responsible. We know this because we all learned for the first time a few months ago that something called the Strait of Hormuz exists and that it can be quite problematic for us in terms of oil and gas shipping.
In addition, quite a few Alabama voters remember that it was the Republicans in this state who led the charge a few years ago to massively increase Alabama’s gas tax.
So, um, pretty tough to go charging off into a campaign right now, if you’re a Republican, proclaiming that Democrats are going to drive your costs up through high prices and taxes.
But what’s even worse is that it’s starting to hit home for a lot of voters that Republicans actually have no idea how to do anything other than give stuff to billionaires and rich companies.
They have no idea how to fix health care. After nearly two decades of bashing Obamacare, they still haven’t put an alternative plan on the table.
They have no idea how to address the affordability crisis. Every single idea they have—from cutting taxes on food to giving out tax breaks for workers to increasing subsidies for child care—is just a recycled idea that Democrats pitched and pushed years ago.
They have so little idea how to fix the housing affordability crisis that they’re not even trying. They just call every Democratic idea to address it “socialism” and “communism” and then scream about transgender athletes.
Even farmers are starting to realize that it was Democrats who tried to help them with climate change; it was Democrats who tried to correct the subsidy issues; it was Democrats who tried to break up the equipment company monopolies; it was Democrats who offered real aid to real farmers, while Republicans sought to bail out corporate farms; and it was Democrats who fought against Trump’s ridiculous tariffs.
So, that’s why Trump’s name and image have disappeared from ads and Republican campaigns in so many places. Because the reality that these people have followed a two-bit con man down a rabbit hole of corruption and self-dealing at the expense of the average American is starting to hit home.
And no amount of doctored-up mailers will save them.
