Former State Rep. Barry Moore’s (R-Enterprise) margin of victory in the Republican primary runoff for Alabama’s second congressional district caught a lot of political watchers off guard.
Moore, who was outspent by a significant margin in his contest against Dothan businessman Jeff Coleman, won by 20 points and carried 12 of the 15 counties in the district, which includes the southeastern corner of the state, from the Wiregrass to the suburbs north of Montgomery.
During an interview with Huntsville radio’s WVNN, Moore talked about his win, and he credited his team for staying focused, even when it looked like the campaign was pulling out ahead.
“We had an amazing grassroots team, and when we heard we might have a lead in the polls, I told them to play like we’re two touchdowns behind, and that’s how we work. We work very hard. Obviously, it was a little discouraging when you jump in a primary with seven people, and one has $2 million. It’s like, wow. But prayerfully, we got in this thing. We stayed the task. We stayed on message. We didn’t sling mud. It just worked out for us. I’m certainly grateful for my voters and the people that got behind us for our team. They just did a remarkable job.”
Moore said he did not anticipate his margin of victory headed into the November 14 contest.
“I didn’t really,” he said. “We felt like we took a lead, something like three or four weeks out. The Lord told us not to go negative. We just kind of stayed on message. They got behind. They went negative. I think people were tired of the negativity. With everything going on in the country, they wanted to hear somebody who was pro-Trump that had a good positive message and a good positive plan to fix the problems and a track record that proved I was going to tell you what I was going to do. It just seemed like to me — you know, we knew we had a little bit of a lead. We got into the debate. We had a great debate performance. I thought that helped us a lot. But I had no idea that it was going to come out a 20-point margin like it did.”
During the economic shutdown and the delay resulting from the postponement of the runoff, Moore said his campaign went into a “service mode” to aid the public during the time of the pandemic, which he said also may have had something to do with his victory.
“I think trying to open Alabama and the way we went to a service mode — as soon as the shutdown, the face-to-face meetings — people were beginning to struggle with the PPP program, the economic injury disaster loans, the unemployment issues because the state was overwhelmed — our campaign staff, I just brought them into my office and said let’s start serving people, let’s start helping the businesses. So we went from a marketing mode to a service mode, which is what you want your congresspeople to do. You need to have a service heart. It was so often about them than about the district. We went into a service mode and trying to help people. That and trying to open Alabama, trying to encourage people to open safely, get businesses to do takeout. We did a lot of live events, streaming on Facebook. There were a number of ways we were able to capitalize off of that — that downtime, whereas most campaigns kind of pulled into a hibernation mode, we went into a service mode.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Alabama, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly and host of Huntsville’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN.
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