The victory of Roy Moore, a populist and religious fundamentalist, in the Alabama Senate primary last week can be seen in two different ways: continuity with the recent past of GOP politics and a radical break from it.
On one hand, the seat left vacant by the Senate’s only true Trumpist, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, will be filled by another Trumpist. When Moore, as is very likely, wins the December 12 special election, the Trumpist caucus of one will rise again in the Senate. And Moore’s campaign against Luther Strange, the former Alabama attorney general appointed to fill Sessions’s seat and backed to the hilt by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, is best viewed as yet another battle in the nearly decade-long intra-party skirmishing that has pitted populists and movement conservatives against the GOP establishment. The same conservative-populist backlash that put conservative stars Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, and Ted Cruz in the Senate also produced crankier nominees for statewide office like Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Todd Akin, and Carl Paladino.
Like the populist-versus-establishment races from 2010 to 2016, the outcome in Alabama in 2017 depended significantly on issues unique to the state and the particular candidates in the race. Moore is a hero to many religious conservatives in Alabama for having been suspended from the state supreme court twice: once for defying a federal court order to remove a monument depicting the Ten Commandments and again for flouting the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling.
The establishment candidate Luther Strange was endorsed by Trump, but his greatest weakness was that he had been appointed by disgraced governor Robert Bentley, who resigned amid a sex-and-campaign-finance scandal that made Bentley the most unpopular governor within his own party in the entire country. Questions of whether a corrupt bargain had been struck between former attorney general Strange and Bentley hung over the race.
But for all of the similarities to the populist-establishment contests of recent years, Moore’s victory also draws a stark contrast with the past. Jeff Sessions was a sober-minded ideological Trumpist, while Moore is more of a temperamental Trumpist, akin to the aforementioned populist cranks O’Donnell, Akin, and Angle. The big difference is that those candidates, prone to making extreme, outlandish, or conspiratorial statements, all lost their races; Moore will almost certainly win in a state Trump carried by 28 points. And some of Moore’s comments and beliefs are far more extreme than those of previous failed populist candidates.
The Constitution declares that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Moore wrote a column at the conspiracy-minded WorldNetDaily website after Keith Ellison of Minnesota in 2006 became the first Muslim elected to Congress: “Muslim Ellison Should Not Sit in Congress.”
Moore’s argument went as follows: Some Muslims have argued that their religious law should be imposed on all people by the state; Ellison is a Muslim; Ellison therefore can’t be trusted to uphold the Constitution. “Congress has the authority and should act to prohibit Ellison from taking the congressional oath today!” Moore concluded.
This kind of rank religious bigotry goes well beyond Trump’s campaign pledge to enact a temporary ban on foreign Muslims traveling to the United States. Republicans were rightly outraged when Senate Democrats recently flirted with a religious test for a Catholic judicial nominee. “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern,” California senator Dianne Feinstein told judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett at a hearing. The GOP will now likely have its own senator who supports an unconstitutional religious test for office.
Republicans running for office next year and in 2020, when Sessions’s original term expires, will likely be hounded by the press to react to Moore’s extreme comments, just as candidates were in 2012 following Todd Akin’s unscientific speculation that women couldn’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape.”
In 2015, Moore, who has consistently argued that homosexual conduct should be illegal, was asked by an interviewer: “Some people who interpret the Bible strictly say that [sodomy] should be punished by death. Do you agree with that?”
“Well, I don’t, you know, I don’t—I’m not here to outline any punishments for sodomy,” Moore demurred. “I can’t help what some people say, what some people do.”
Democrats have a glimmer of hope that they might use Moore’s extreme statements to pull off a shocking upset in Alabama, as Republicans did in Massachusetts in 2010, when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s seat in what amounted to a referendum on Obamacare. Moore won his last election to the state supreme court in 2012 with only 51.8 percent of the vote, running 9 points behind Mitt Romney’s performance in the state. But Democrats seem to have squandered what little opportunity they had by nominating a staunch liberal, Doug Jones, who supports taxpayer-funding of abortion and told NBC’s Chuck Todd on September 27 that he opposes any limits whatsoever on late-term abortion.
So what does Moore’s primary victory and likely ascent to the Senate mean for the future of the Republican party? There does seem to be a theme of action and reaction in the GOP civil war. The widespread success of conservative-populist candidates in 2010 was driven by backlash to the 2008 bank bailout, Obamacare, and the presidency of Barack Obama. Establishment Republican candidates generally succeeded in 2012 and 2014 primaries, partly in reaction against populist candidates who lost general elections and Tea Party-driven politics in Congress, including the 2013 government shutdown. In 2016, even as Donald Trump rode a wave of media attention and populist sentiment to a plurality of the vote in the GOP presidential contest, Trumpist candidates were crushed in primaries by Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and John McCain.
While Moore’s victory by itself is hardly clear-cut evidence that the party will take a more Trumpian turn in 2018, there are suggestive signs that it may. In Arizona, Trumpist candidate Kelli Ward, who lost her 2016 race against John McCain, leads Jeff Flake by a wide margin in the polls. In Virginia, Trumpist Corey Stewart, whose biggest issue is protecting Confederate monuments, lost to establishment Republican Ed Gillespie in the gubernatorial primary by just 1.2 percent. Stewart is now running for the GOP Senate nomination. In Tennessee, incumbent Bob Corker’s retirement raises the prospects of Trumpist success.
Establishment Republicans and mainstream conservatives in Congress no longer have the luxury of running against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. Congressional GOP failures may well fuel populist sentiment, as will simple partisan loyalty to President Trump. And the Trump presidency may also scare off the type of moderate, conservative, and more-educated voters that mainstream conservatives need to defeat Trumpist candidates.
A populist fire has been smoldering on the right for some time now. Republicans will either learn to tend it properly or watch the party they once knew burn to the ground.
John McCormack is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
