While Washington is gripped with the federal government shutdown, the most revealing congressional news this week may have come from Birmingham rather than the beltway. It’s in Alabama, where college football talk show host Paul Finebaum is musing about trading calls from Phyllis from Mulga (RIP) for quorum calls in the United States Senate.
Finebaum is set to visit Washington for meetings with Republicans later this month and is serious about a possible bid, I’m told. Still, it remains to be seen if the “Mouth of the South” wants to spend the better part of his retirement years on airplanes as a freshman senator for a $174,000 salary that’s well south of his ESPN payday (assuming the newly-revealed Republican can get through a purity test of a GOP primary).
What’s significant about the Finebaum float — his interest in a run and, more to the point, the interest in him — is how it illustrates the paradox of today’s Senate Republicans.
Senate GOP Leader John Thune and his lieutenants have largely remained silent as President Donald Trump has ordered the Justice Department to target his adversaries, enriched himself and his family through brazen self-dealing and repeatedly stepped on congressional prerogatives, among other transgressions they’d never tolerate from a Democratic president. The reason the Republican pushback on the FCC’s threats against Jimmy Kimmel stood out last month is because GOP lawmakers have otherwise been so pliant.
Yet at the same time — and with purposefully little fanfare — Thune and other lawmakers have quietly gone about trying to normie’ize their conference with mainstream Republicans. Of course, what’s normal in the Trump era is all relative — the price of admission for every GOP senator and would-be senator not named Murkowski or Collins is complete and total fealty to the president.
What Thune is doing, though, is shaping a Senate Republican conference that will outlast Trump (if not Trumpism) and offer some ballast against a House that’s sure to move with the momentary tides toward isolationism and populism.
Trump gets winners and Thune gets to repurpose the GOP’s one-man primary to protect his incumbents and anoint his preferred open seat candidates. Not that Thune would ever say it out loud, but he’s effectively reprogramming the ultimate anti-establishment leader to put down any insurgencies. And Trump is happy to do it, as long as the candidates say nice things about him.
Just glance at the 2026 Senate map. What jumps out, with one very important exception, is what’s not happening: Unlike so many times in the last 15 years, Senate Republicans are not poised to throw away winnable seats because of messy primaries and controversial nominees.
You know the roster, which probably still causes Mitch McConnell to wake up in the middle of the night: Kari Lake, Roy Moore, Blake Masters, Dr. Oz, Herschel Walker, Matt Rosendale. I could go on. Christine O’Donnell, witch, etc. But you get the point.
Largely thanks to Thune’s diplomacy — and, yes, willingness to bite his tongue on Trump’s conduct — almost every Senate Republican incumbent appears to be avoiding a primary challenge that could imperil the seat in the general election.
The president has already endorsed, among others, Senators Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Mike Rounds (S.D.), Jon Husted (Ohio), Shelley Moore Capito (W.V.) and Dan Sullivan (Ark). This early laying of hands effectively insulates these incumbents — who hail from the pre-Trump era of GOP politics — from an intra-party threat.
Just as significant, and far more surprising, Thune and White House aides have convinced Trump there’s nothing to be gained by publicly attacking Senator Susan Collins, let alone calling for a primary against her. With his silence, a word rarely used in the same sentence with Trump, the president has done more for the Senate GOP’s most endangered incumbent than his criticism or praise would in blue-but-bifurcated Maine.
As striking is how swiftly Trump has intervened in a handful of open seat races, perhaps most significantly in Michigan.
By endorsing former Rep. Mike Rogers, who only lost his Senate bid by 0.3 percent last year, the president has spared Thune and Co. of a costly primary in a state once famous for its Republican divisions. Instead, it’s Democrats who will have a protracted primary in the race to succeed Sen. Gary Peters, who’s retiring. A Republican hasn’t won a Senate seat there since 1994, but Rogers, a decidedly pre-Trump figure who’s reinvented himself to pass in Trump’s party, gives them their best chance to win a seat there since, well, he ran in 2024.
In Iowa, too, Trump’s quick embrace of Rep. Ashley Hinson has all but ended the primary. With Sen. Joni Ernst’s now-announced retirement close to an open secret in Washington, Republicans used the months before Ernst made it official to line up support for Hinson, a 45-year-old former TV broadcaster in Cedar Rapids who is not going to remind anyone of Christine O’Donnell.
The seat currently held by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), another lame duck, will be harder for Republicans to claim. But after twice being left at the altar by former Gov. Chris Sununu, Thune and his advisers moved to woo the Sununu who has already served in the Senate, older brother John E. Sununu.
The question now is how much the former senator, who lost his seat to Shaheen in 2008, will bow and scrape to Trump, and if it’s enough for the president to weigh in and nudge out Scott Brown at the same time. Brown already served as ambassador to New Zealand in the first Trump term, and there’s surely a post equally alluring now, but it’s hard to see unless the president himself intervenes.
There’s not much doubt who leading Republicans in Washington prefer, though: “Brown is going to find it hard to run against a Sununu,” as one well-placed official told me.
In the South, though — where Trump is up there with air conditioning and tackle football — Senate Republicans have had less success so far. And the president is partly to blame.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) may have retired anyway, but the president’s strong-arm tactics drove him out this summer. And then instead of trying to find the best possible successor, Senate Republicans first held the seat open for Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, before anointing Trump’s RNC chair, Michael Whatley. Whatley may win yet, given North Carolina’s GOP tendencies in federal elections, but Republicans are privately concerned about his prospects up against perhaps the best Democratic recruit yet of the midterms: former Gov. Roy Cooper.
While Democrats were luring Cooper, Republicans were failing to coax Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp into the race against Sen. Jon Ossoff. Given their history – namely Trump demanding Kemp help him steal Georgia in 2020 and then running a primary against him two years later – the president wasn’t exactly the man to persuade the governor and his influential wife, Marty. Kemp has since rallied to Derek Dooley, son of University of Georgia football legend Vince Dooley, and Rep. Buddy Carter can self-fund to some degree. But neither candidate is an instant frontrunner against Ossoff as Kemp would have been.
Still, Republicans could (and have!) done worse than nominating the likes of Whatley and Carter (see: Herschel Walker and Mark Robinson)
The biggest potential mess — one of those primaries of yore that still keep McConnell up at night — is in Texas.
In a difficult midterm where Republicans can’t flip Georgia, Michigan or New Hampshire, it’s possible to squint hard enough and see Texas as either the 50th or 51stt Democratic seat (yes, that involves some intense squinting — and Maine, North Carolina and potentially Ohio going blue).
No, it’s not likely. But it would be a lot less likely if Thune can win over Trump on his biggest pitch yet: getting the president to endorse Sen. John Cornyn over Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Such an eventuality would have been unthinkable at the start of summer, when polls showed Paxton trouncing the four-term incumbent. But between an advertising onslaught from pro-Cornyn outside groups and a series of bad headlines for Paxton (most memorably the attorney general’s wife publicly declaring she was seeking a divorce “on biblical grounds” ), the senator can at least show Trump polling indicating a competitive race. Which, of course, is vital for a president who never wants to endorse a loser.
Next door, in Louisiana, there’s another incumbent who’d be thrilled for Trump’s endorsement. But given Sen. Bill Cassidy’s impeachment “aye” in 2021, that’s a taller order. If the president won’t get behind Cassidy, the question down the bayou is if he blesses the normie-in-waiting: Rep. Julia Letlow. In either case, Republicans are no more likely to lose the seat in the general election than the Saints are to win the Super Bowl.
Which brings us back, at last, to words I never conjured till now: Senator Paul Finebaum (R-Ala.).
Whoever wins the nomination in Alabama will almost certainly become the next senator – but more than a few GOP senators care about who they’ll be serving with in such red states where the primary is tantamount to victory. Among those is Alabama’s other senator, Katie Britt, who had a trying relationship at times with the departing Sen. Tommy Tuberville and would surely get along better with Finebaum (same as she would have with Bruce Pearl, the outgoing Auburn basketball coach who flirted with the seat). But, as Finebaum’s callers are wont to say of non-SEC competition, Paawwwl ain’t played nobody yet.
Finebaum could become a latter-day Trumper, same as others in the GOP who’ve undergone MAGA conversion therapy, but there is a catch. The president’s total and complete endorsement ™ comes with an unwritten disclaimer: If your conscience ever moves you and you criticize him, that endorsement can be withdrawn just as quickly as it was proffered.
