How does an accused sex offender go about getting elected to public office? With Alabama’s special Senate election taking place Tuesday, Republican Roy Moore has chosen to pursue a bold strategy: putting on the full armor of Trump and vanishing almost entirely from the voters’ view.
In the closing days of a campaign, your typical candidate pinballs from event to event, trying to forge a personal connection with as many voters as possible. You can sleep when you’re elected.
Democrat Doug Jones, for example, has kept a daunting schedule barnstorming around the state with local and national Democratic leaders, visiting field offices and dropping by canvassing events, trying to whip up liberal enthusiasm for a race that is Democrats’ best chance to take an Alabama Senate seat in decades.
Meanwhile, Roy Moore has disappeared from the campaign trail, making zero public appearances since a rally in Fairhope last week. (Moore is scheduled to attend two rallies this week alongside Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon, whose unflagging support has done more than anything else to stabilize Moore’s campaign.)
Over the weekend, he reportedly wasn’t even in the state: Two Republicans said he had traveled to Philadelphia to watch Saturday’s Army-Navy football game. His campaign refused to say whether he had actually made the trip.
For an ordinary candidate, this kind of vanishing act would be akin to throwing in the towel. But Moore’s campaign has apparently decided that letting him out in public is more likely to hurt his chances than to help them. It’s not hard to see why: Moore has shown a particular gift for handling the spotlight badly during his campaign, partially substantiating the allegations against him during a cupcake interview with Sean Hannity, praising Vladimir Putin, arguing that America is the “focus of evil” in the world, and opining for the happy days when families cared for one another, “even though,” he acknowledges, “we had slavery.”
If voters go to the polls Tuesday with this Roy Moore in their minds, Jones may have a shot. So Moore’s campaign is striving to replace that calculation with another one. The most important choice Alabamans face, they tell voters, isn’t between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. It’s between Donald Trump and the liberal establishment that seeks to frustrate his agenda at every turn.
“You see, this is President Trump’s agenda. And that’s why it’s so important that Judge Moore win this race,” Moore’s chief political strategist Dean Young said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “This is Donald Trump on trial in Alabama. If the people of Alabama vote for this liberal Democrat Doug Jones, then they’re voting against the president who they put in office at the highest level.”
“It’s ground zero for President Donald Trump,” Young continued. “If they can beat him, they can beat his agenda, because Judge Moore stands with Donald Trump and his agenda.”
Trump himself is using similar tactics. Each time he has tweeted his support for Moore, he has reminded voters exactly why: “We can’t have a Pelosi/Schumer Liberal Democrat, Jones, in that important Alabama Senate seat. Need your vote to Make America Great Again!”
Moore’s surrogates are not the only ones turning the election into a proxy war. High-profile Democrats like former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick and Sen. Cory Booker have stumped for Jones in recent weeks, while Barack Obama has reportedly recorded a robocall for the Jones campaign. Meanwhile, the race has dominated national media coverage for weeks—partially due to the explosiveness of the allegations against Moore, partially because it’s the only race to cover this month.
Will this national focus help convince Alabama voters to grit their teeth and carry Moore across the finish line? We won’t know until Tuesday night. But if the former judge does manage to pull out the victory, it’ll be clear who the real winners are: Donald Trump and his agenda, which Roy Moore has tried to substitute for a candidacy.
