Austin Barbour is a partner in Strategic Partners & Media, a Republican media firm, as well as a partner in the Clearwater Group. Austin and his family live in Jackson, Mississippi.

As the political class in Washington debates the future of the Republican Party—buzzing about whether the GOP will hold fast to its traditional, core ideals or embrace the Trump-style populism that put a Republican back in the White House—voters in Alabama will make a defining decision in the U.S. Senate special election on September 26. And Alabamians’ choice is as clear as mud.

In the two-man runoff to pick the Republican Party’s nominee to fill Jeff Sessions’ former seat, one choice, Luther Strange, is from the GOP’s traditional wing; the other, Roy Moore, is from its rebellious populist faction. The traditional candidate is a former state attorney general. The populist candidate is an on-again, off-again state Supreme Court justice. The traditional candidate has the support of President Donald Trump, who defeated virtually the entire traditional wing of the GOP in his 2016 run. The populist candidate has the support of many of Trump’s most ardent backers, including former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.


It’s an election that will be held up nationally as a definitive sign of the direction the Republican Party is heading, even as its reality doesn’t nicely fit a preconceived narrative.

In 2014, I was deeply involved in a similar election that also garnered national attention—the U.S. Senate race held next door, in Mississippi. Like the Alabama runoff, it was a race that would affect other key statewide votes, and one that tea-leaf readers would point to as a sign of the GOP’s direction. In that race, I was a senior adviser to the incumbent, Thad Cochran, as he fended off a primary challenge.

My experiences in that race tell me that this election is anyone’s for the taking, and that, unique as the Strange-Moore race is, both candidates have a relatively clear path to victory. They just need to look at what worked—and didn’t—in the state next door.



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Senator Cochran was and is a legend in my home state. He had not sniffed a serious electoral challenge since I was a young boy growing up in Yazoo City. As he prepared for reelection to a seventh term in the Senate, no one expected the battle brought forth by Chris McDaniel—a young, conservative state senator from Mississippi’s Pine Belt.

McDaniel channeled a message that was anti-Washington, anti-establishment and light on details about policy and governing. He had boundless confidence and a genuine knack for convincing his audience that when he went to Washington, he would shake things up. His campaign was a potent combination of Ted Cruz’s tea-party style platform and Donald Trump’s political base in the South, and it worked: Whether they believed they would ever end up in this position or not, McDaniel and his team found themselves late on the night of June 3, 2014 as the lead vote-getter in the first round of the GOP Senate primary.

Mississippi, like Alabama, has a runoff primary system. A candidate must receive more than 50 percent of the vote in order to win the party’s nomination. On June 3, McDaniel won 49.5 percent of the vote to Cochran’s 49 percent. We lived to fight another day, and immediately turned our attention to the runoff vote on June 24.

For all of us involved in the Cochran campaign, it took months to truly realize the mistakes we had made in the primary. During a very long meeting the night of our first-round loss, we laid the groundwork for how we would turn around the campaign over the next three weeks. We decided to focus all our energy on a few key priorities: establishing the most thorough voter-identification program in the history of Mississippi; motivating the thousands of likely Cochran voters who hadn’t voted during the primary because they thought Thad would win easily; finding new voters who would vote for Thad during the runoff; having our candidate outwork his much younger opponent; doing away with polling (we knew what we had to talk about and knew we were behind on the ballot) and re-targeting the money we’d save; and lastly, pushing a targeted message that was optimistic and focused on what Thad would do for Mississippi during the next six years.

In many ways, for the next three weeks, we ran a general election campaign.

Senator Cochran’s energy was contagious—not only to the staff, but to those around the state who were now ready to go organize their local precincts on his behalf. The day after what I imagine was one of the longest nights in his life, Thad was shaking hands at the Chick-fil-A restaurants in Madison and Flowood—centrally located in two of Mississippi’s most-important GOP counties.

While Thad was campaigning, our opponent went dark. All of a sudden, the underdog outsider candidate so full of energy and bluster found himself as the favorite in the race. When you’re ahead, you want to avoid doing anything to rock the boat in the precious few days leading up to an election. Days went by, and there was no movement from the McDaniel campaign—no rallies, no speeches, no nothing. This was a critical mistake, allowing Cochran to gain precious momentum.

Many election-watchers thought the race was over. Although we had great help from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a pro-Cochran Super PAC and our friends and allies in Mississippi, McDaniel had the political and financial support of a wide array of national groups. They all saw a major victory in their future—and the ability to brag that they took down a key member of the Senate GOP establishment.

We knew a vast majority of Washington had written off Thad’s chances, but we were thankful Mississippi voters hadn’t. I assume my peers involved with Strange’s campaign feel now like we did: No one thinks we can win, but we are gonna prove them wrong. When the ballots were counted, Cochran had won the runoff, 51 percent to 49 percent. The Washington Post likened the improbability of that win to “someone pitching a perfect game; you’ll not see a victory like this one any time soon.”

If I was giving free advice to the Strange campaign, I’d recommend they follow one specific approach from our playbook: Run the runoff like it’s a general election. Explain to voters that the winner on September 26 will be the next senator from Alabama. Highlight the seriousness of this primary choice and the finality of the outcome. Don’t just depend on negative ads from D.C.-based groups to get you over the finish line—have your candidate promote an optimistic message, with less anger and more reason and promise. Luther Strange cannot out-Roy Moore Roy Moore.

The Strange campaign also has to find new voters. Alabama, like Mississippi, doesn’t have party registration and as long as you didn’t vote in the Democratic primary, you are eligible to vote in the Republican runoff. There are thousands of voters in Alabama who fall into this category.

We focused our runoff campaign on four key target groups we knew we could turn out for the runoff, bringing out tens of thousands of new Cochran votes: African-American voters who had historically supported Thad in a greater way than any other Mississippi Republican; middle-class white voters in the Delta who are surrounded by an agricultural economy that Senator Cochran had fought for over decades in Congress; college-educated voters who viewed Thad as more optimistic and reasoned than his opponent; and voters who felt their community needed Cochran’s support and the influence that came from his powerful role as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Strange doesn’t have the same deep history of serving his state in the U.S. Senate. So in the remaining few days before the runoff, his campaign will have to find its own unique ways to win over new voters. I’d look for people who might be swayed by President Trump’s endorsement but who didn’t vote in the primary’s first round; those who prefer the more thoughtful and less-controversial approach of a senator in the mode of a Richard Shelby or a Jeff Sessions; or those who simply don’t like Roy Moore and his brand of populism.

As for Moore, my advice for his campaign is pretty simple: Keep your base motivated, turn them out in the most organized way you can muster, stay hungry and keep working hard. Protect your candidate down the stretch and maintain a low profile by seeking out less earned media, holding smaller events and avoiding the temptation to answer every question the press throws your way. To use an old Southern saying, “keep it between the ditches” in the final days, and you’ll give your candidate a great chance to win.

In political campaigns, days are like weeks and weeks are like months. One week out, there’s still time to change the race. And for my pundit friends in Washington, a word of advice: Don’t read too much into the polls: This thing could easily go either way.