Tuesday, September 26th 2017 (WASHINGTON) – In the Tuesday runoff election to fill the Alabama Senate seat held for 20 years by current Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Republican voters are looking at two candidates to see who will be most successful in carrying the Donald Trump torch to Washington.
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While there are a number of issues at play in the runoff, voters are rallying behind the message that less of Washington is more. That is just one of the reasons that Judge Roy Moore is ahead of Sen. Luther Strange in all of the polls.
Puns aside, it is a strange race, made all the more peculiar by a last-ditch campaign push by President Donald Trump who threw his support behind the incumbent Sen. Strange, while Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon stumped for Moore.
Political insiders made it clear that the dueling campaign rallies on Monday night, with Moore alongside Bannon in the southern part of the state and Vice President Mike Pence stumping for Strange in Birmingham, is not a division in Trump world.
“Trump wins either way,” explained D.C.-based Republican analyst Ford O’Connell. Both candidates are fully back Trump and his agenda, both are dyed in the wool conservatives. “So it’s important to understand why Trump went with Strange rather than the more than the more Trumpian candidate, so to speak.”
Strange is less likely to be a “wild-card,” O’Connell explained, a trait among conservative lawmakers that has already frustrated the GOP leadership’s multiple efforts to pass a health care bill this year.
“Trump went out to back Luther Strange because he was trying to throw an olive branch to Mitch McConnell,” he continued, noting “it is going to be hard to get Moore to buy into some compromise votes that Trump may want to take.”
That hard-nosed quality that appeals to many voters in Alabama, could mean a headache for the Senate leadership and could even jeopardize deals the president has shown he is willing to cut with moderates or Democrats.
Jonathan Gray, Republican strategist in Alabama, explained Donald Trump’s rationale for backing Strange, saying, “he needed to curry favor with the leadership and this was low-hanging fruit.”
However, that association with the GOP leadership in Washington has made Strange unpalatable to many voters and Steve Bannon capitalized on the connection during his rally with Moore on Monday night.
“They weighed and measured Luther Strange and at the end of the day it was $30 million that bought him,” Bannon said, charging, “Mitch McConnell owns him lock, stock and barrel.”
Luther Strange, who has been through a series of bruising fights among Republicans since he got to Washington in February, put out campaign ads bragging that he stood behind McConnell, something Gray found completely baffling.
“The stench of the establishment is very, very real right now,” Gray explained. “There is nothing about [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell that makes anybody in Alabama warm and fuzzy.”
The money McConnell threw into the campaign in all likelihood may have accomplished “the reverse of what they intended,” Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) acknowledged.
On top of that, Strange has been dogged by the way he wass appointed to the Senate. In brief, former Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley appointed Strange just a few months after then-Attorney General Strange called off an investigation into an embarrassing and ultimately impeachable sex scandal. Once Strange was secured in his new seat in Washington, the procedure went ahead and Bentley was removed.
That process, Byrne noted, “also made him look like the swampiest of swamp critters.”
“You can spend all the money in the world you want, it’s not gonna overcome some of those problems,” the congressman added.
Even sympathizing with Trump’s need to make concessions to the Republican leadership in Congress, it’s still hard to understand why Trump would not back Alabama’s original anti-establishment candidate. Judge Roy Moore is an uncompromising social conservative who speaks his mind, who was twice elected and twice removed from his seat on the Alabama Supreme Court.
In 2003, he was removed from office after refusing to take down a massive display of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the state court. He was reelected in 2013 and removed just six months ago after ordering probate judges not to issue licenses for same-sex marriages.
To the voters of Alabama, Moore comes off as a man who will “stick to his principles, right, wrong or indifferent,” even though it meant losing his job–twice, Gray said. Strange, because of his shady appointment, he continued, has come off as “a guy who gave away his principles so he could get a job.”
“That’s at 100 percent awareness for the people of Alabama,” he said, even if the rest of the country is focused on the role of McConnell, Bannon or Trump.
“That’s what this thing comes down to. The rest of it, honestly, it’s static.”
Even with a last-minute campaign rally in Huntsville featuring Donald Trump himself has done little to move the polls in favor of Strange.
Alabama GOP chairwoman Terry Lathan noted that the 2017 special election has been especially unique because the candidates are vying for Jeff Sessions’ old seat, which was largely uncontested for twenty years. Alabama Republican voters haven’t had to slug it out over a candidate for the past 20 years.
“Anytime you have a primary, especially a very contentious one, it’s like having a family argument,” she said. “When we step back and let the dust settle from this, I believe that Alabama voters will go back December 12 and elect a Republican.”
Lathan compared the process to the 2017 presidential elections when state Republicans rallied behind Donald Trump. “History has shown us that we come together and we support a conservative candidate.”
As rough as Moore and Strange have gotten with one another, grappling in debates and campaign ads, President Trump has been noticeably absent from the fray.
The Moore campaign is “grateful” that the president hasn’t gone after their candidate, Gray said, noting Alabama is “the first time Donald Trump has campaigned positively for someone.”
“There are overtures there,” he said, noting that Trump has been sensitive to not upsetting his base in Alabama.
That may not be the case in other races as the 2018 midterm elections where Trump or the establishment Republicans may use a heavy hand to affect the outcome. Both experts and state officials emphasized that a Republican runoff election for one of the most conservative seats in Washington is not predictive of the diverse political landscape in 2018.
The polls close in Alabama Tuesday night at 7 p.m. CST.
