Firebrand Thumps Establishment-Backed Incumbent in Alabama Senate Runoff

Republicans in Alabama on Tuesday ensured that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s perpetual migraine will pound a little harder by nominating firebrand religious conservative Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate.

Either Moore will be upset in December’s general election, shrinking McConnell’s already thin majority. Or he will win and become one more wild card in an unruly caucus that has made governing hard in the era of President Donald Trump.

Moore’s victory in the Republican runoff ends the short Senate career of Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.), who won appointment to the seat vacated by Jeff Sessions, who became Trump’s attorney general. He had the backing of Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and the state’s other senator, Republican Richard Shelby.

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But it was not nearly enough to stop the Moore juggernaut.

With 100 percent of precincts reporting, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court had 54.6 percent of the vote. Strange was ahead in just four counties.

Moore made clear that he would not hold Trump’s endorsement of his opponent against him.

“Together, we can make America great,” he told a boisterous crowd at his campaign headquarters in the state capital. “We can support the president’s agenda.”

For his part, Strange promised to continue helping Trump.

“From the beginning of this campaign, my priority has been serving the people of Alabama,” he said in a statement. “Tomorrow I will go back to work with President Trump and do all I can to advance his agenda over the next few weeks.”

Moore alluded to controversies he courted during his two tenures on the state high court, which twice interrupted his judicial career.

“I fought in the courts against liberal judges who have usurped the authority of the Constitution, and I’ll fight for you.”

Moore won the backing of the other major candidates who came up short in the first round of voting last month. He also attracted national support from pro-Trump figures such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former White House advisers Stephen Bannon and Sebastian Gorka, nationally syndicated radio talk-show hosts, and the driving force behind Britain’s exit from the European Union, Nigel Farage.

Bannon on Tuesday cast the race as a fight between the special interests in Washington and the people.

“The question was called today in the state of Alabama. Which is sovereign? The people, or the money?” he said. “And Alabama answered today — the people.”

Moore’s high-profile supporters may have helped him build momentum, but even without them, he has long been a household name in the Heart of Dixie. He fits the populist outsider mold that often finds an audience in Alabama. He is a proud Christian conservative who is not afraid to offend the forces of secularism and modernity — even at the cost of his own job.

Twice, Moore lost his spot as head of the state Supreme Court. The first time, an ethics panel removed him for defying a federal judge’s order to remove a Ten Commandments monument that he had installed in the Alabama Judicial Building. The second time — coming after Moore had made a successful comeback — occurred when the ethics panel suspended him for instructing the state’s probate judges to follow state law rather than the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage in 2015.

Both stances gave him hero status in some quarters and made him a pariah in other circles.

The controversy that surrounds Moore is one of the reasons some analysts believe Democrat Doug Jones might have an outside chance in the general election. It would be a major upset, but when Moore made his comeback to the Supreme Court in 2012, he won just 51.8 percent of the vote.

Moore’s victory probably will not hurt Trump much with his core supporters. Most of them backed Moore, arguing he would be a more reliable ally for the president’s agenda. Trump himself said at a Strange rally in Huntsville on Friday that he would work hard for Moore in the general election should he be the GOP nominee.

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The biggest loser, other than Strange, figures to be McConnell. A super PAC closely aligned with the Kentucky Republican dumped millions of dollars into a futile effort to save Strange. Moore expressed disgust and suggested in an interview with LifeZette several weeks ago that McConnell should be replaced as Republican leader in the Senate.

The win also boosts anti-Establishment activists who saw the special election as a tune-up for the 2018 midterm elections, in which they hope to take down incumbent Republicans whom they view as insufficiently conservative or hostile to Trump’s agenda.

At the top of that hit list are Republican Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Dean Heller of Nevada. Both have drawn strong primary challenges with experience running statewide races.

Kelli Ward, who plans to challenge Flake, congratulated Moore.

“Voters in Arizona feel an equal level of frustration with Sen. Jeff Flake, who has been one of the most vocal critics of President Trump,” Ward said in a statement. “The Senate leadership should take note of what has transpired in Alabama and end their dishonest attacks against me.”