Former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore won the GOP primary leading to the seat formerly held by current Federal AG Jeff Sessions last night, and did so handily, according to NBC News:
Moore’s victory over Strange was a landslide — 54.6 percent (262,204 votes) to 45.4 percent (218,066 votes), with 100 percent of the vote counted — despite Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell having taken extraordinary measures and spending millions of dollars trying to knock back the twice-removed former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
So what are the motivations of the primary voters. Does Moore’s strong religious predilections suggest the Alabama GOP wants to replace American government with a Christian theocracy?
Or is this more properly a rejection of President Trump’s selection of Strange, indicating a waning of Trump’s influence? Despite Trump backing Strange, Moore indicated he is loyal to Trump, so this scenario may be somewhat problematic. NBC News reports on this topic:
Cygnal, a GOP consulting firm based in Alabama, commissioned a poll and found that “Trump’s endorsement does not appear to have impacted the race,” the firm’s Matt Hubbard wrote in a memo shared with NBC News.
Most voters polled said they were not influenced by Trump, and those that did were equally likely to say it pushed them toward Moore — perhaps because of Trump off-hand comment at the Huntsville rally last Friday to back Strange that he “might have made a mistake” in supporting him.
Still, comments like that let Trump hedge his bets considerably and convinced Moore supporters that he only backed Strange under duress from McConnell.
Or a dislike of the manner in which Strange acquired the job in the first place, in which as Alabama AG he was investigating the then-Alabama governor, who then appointed him to the post? In this scenario, we’d have to accept that twice being ejected from the Supreme Court for ethics violations is better than accepting the bribe of the Senatorial seat – the latter an unproven charge.
Or was it merely another incident of an intensely interested faction overwhelming the general good sense of the electorate because the latter couldn’t be bothered to actually vote?
But in an election in which fewer than three in 20 voters were expected to turn out, according to the secretary of state, the anti-establishment mood and Moore’s enthusiastic base, including the evangelical community, trumped Trump’s endorsement.
“Roy Moore, at least to a very large minority of the Alabama population, is an absolute folk hero,” said Quin Hillyer, a conservative commentator and former Alabama congressional candidate.
In the end, that may be the most accurate evaluation. Moore will now have to campaign for the entire electorate, not just the GOP voters, and the substance of his campaign should be quite interesting. Will he continue to exhibit the attitude that his religious beliefs trump Federal law? If so, then the result of the election campaign against Democrat Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney, may signal how Alabama’s feeling about being part of a secular union – if significant numbers of voters turn out. But, since this will be a special election, I suspect the numbers will be low.
I expect Moore to defeat Jones as those who think we need Yet More Religion in government will turn out en masse, and too many of the voters in Alabama who do not share this fascination with the deeply religious will find something better to do that day.
