Roby began representing the 2nd Congressional District in 2010, but her popularity has waned since then in part because the congresswoman has been critical of Trump. On June 5, Roby only won 39 percent of the vote in Alabama’s primary. Bright, her main challenger, won 29 percent of the vote, forcing Roby into Tuesday’s runoff.
The winner of today’s runoff will be favored to hold the seat come November.
Roby’s relationship with Trump
Bright has branded Roby as disloyal to Trump, and he has joined other conservatives who are mobilizing against her. (Bright held Roby’s congressional seat before he lost to her in 2010.)
In 2016, Roby condemned Trump after the release of a videotape that caught him bragging about sexual assault, and urged him to “step aside and allow a responsible, respectable Republican to lead the ticket.”
That year, Roby ran 17 points behind the president in her southeast Alabama district. Thousands of conservatives wrote in other names to protest her Trump statement.
But now the president has backed Roby, and she and her allies claim that she has seen the light. In a June 22 tweet, Trump wrote that Roby had become “a consistent and reliable vote for our Make America Great Again Agenda.” In a robocall that went out to voters this week, Vice President Pence reiterated Trump’s support. In TV ads, the national Chamber of Commerce portrayed Roby as a key Trump ally and Bright as a Democratic turncoat.
“Bright voted for Nancy Pelosi’s liberal agenda over 70 percent of the time, took $25,000 in campaign contributions from Nancy Pelosi, and even defended Obamacare,” a narrator warned in the ads.
Bright’s campaign against Roby
Bright has focused on Roby’s 2016 comments and her voting record to argue that she has lost her way. A former mayor of Montgomery who had been one of the House’s most conservative Democrats, Bright said he wanted to shut down the special counsel’s probe into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. He also argued that Roby provided reliable, unthinking support for spending bills, focusing especially on this year’s omnibus package, which the president signed and then condemned.
“It funded Planned Parenthood [and] it funded the Affordable Care Act — things that our congressperson promised years ago that she would not support,” Bright told a local public access station last week.
Roby largely ignored Bright’s attacks, hammering him on his single term as a Democratic congressman. She ran on the clout she had built across four terms in a Republican majority, from backing work requirements for food-stamp recipients to barring money for Planned Parenthood as part of family planning funds.
“My record is a strong conservative record that I stand by,” she told the Associated Press last week after a lunch event with peanut farmers.
Bright has argued that his move into the Republican Party is not a problem for voters — and that Trump’s endorsement of Roby doesn’t mean she’ll win.
“The president’s oh and two in Alabama,” Bright told BuzzFeed last week, referring to the president’s 2017 endorsements of two Republicans who lost Senate races. “I’m gonna make him oh and three.”
