With all precincts reporting, former Alabama supreme court justice justice Roy Moore defeated former state attorney general Luther Strange 54.6 percent to 45.4 percent in the Republican Senate primary to finish out Jeff Sessions’ term.
Some of the big winners of the night, aside from Moore, were the pollsters who were right on the nose: Four out of the five final polls in the RealClearPolitics average were within one point of the 9-point margin of victory.
While some pundits have portrayed the defeat of Strange as serious loss for President Trump, who endorsed Strange early and campaigned with Strange over the weekend, that analysis seems to be overdone. True, there would have been a huge political upside for Trump if he had shown he could close a 9-point gap in the polls with a campaign rally and a handful of tweets. But the GOP primary to replace Jeff Sessions, the one senator who endorsed Trump when the GOP nomination was truly up for grabs, was a contest between two men who were falling over each other to claim that they were more like Trump or more likely to help Trump succeed than the other. A vote for Moore was hardly a rebuke to Trump.
One of the biggest factors in the race had nothing to do with Trump but rather local politics. Strange was appointed to Sessions’ vacant seat earlier this year by a governor, Robert Bentley, who was under an investigation that Strange had been overseeing as attorney general. Bentley resigned a few months after appointing Strange, as the sex scandal and campaign-finance violations appeared certain to result in his impeachment. As the scandal grew bigger last fall, Bentley became the least popular governor in America in his own party, with only 42 percent of Alabama Republicans approving of him. Bentley’s hand-picked senator finished Tuesday’s runoff with 45 percent of the vote.
Moore now starts out as the heavy favorite to win the general election on December 12 and serve out the remaining three years of Sessions’ Senate term. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Alabama by 28 points.
But there is reason to believe that the race could be closer than you’d think: One poll found Moore and Strange each running only about four points ahead of Democrat Doug Jones, and the extremely controversial Moore won his last race for state supreme court justice with only 51.8 percent of the vote, running about 9 points behind Mitt Romney on the 2012 ballot.
If a Republican could win Ted Kennedy’s seat a year after Obama was inaugurated, could a Democrat win Jeff Sessions’ seat a year after Trump was inaugurated? “It would certainly be on the magnitude of Massachusetts 2010,” elections analyst Sean Trende of RealClear Politics told me in an email. “Alabama may be marginally less competitive than Massachusetts, but it is heavily racially polarized, meaning it doesn’t swing much.”
“That said, Moore is so polarizing—he nearly lost his last race in Alabama—that we can’t write off the possibility,” Trende added.
One thing that could make Alabama an even longer shot for Democrats is their decision to nominate a Senate candidate who supports a right to abortion. The only sitting Democratic governor in the Deep South is Jon Bel Edwards, who won in 2015 as a pro-life candidate against a scandal-tarred Republican.
Jones does not appear to be a great fit for the state, and Alabama is certainly Roy Moore’s race to lose.
