President Trump boosted Sen. Luther Strange into a September runoff with Roy Moore in Alabama on Tuesday for the right to serve out the remainder of the Senate term Attorney General Jeff Sessions won in 2014. Now we’ll see if Trump has the clout with the Republican base to help Strange go all the way.
Alabama Republicans form the bulwark of Trump’s base within the national party. Yet Strange, appointed in January to succeed Sessions on a temporary basis, came in second to Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. Moore led 40 percent to 32 percent with 85 percent of precincts reporting, short of the 50 percent he needed to avoid a Sept. 26 runoff for the GOP nomination in the special election.
Republican insiders will be watching the Moore-Strange runoff for clues to Trump’s reach in solid red states and possible extent of his influence with voters in the 2018 midterm elections, when the GOP expects to target as many as 10 states that are held by Democrats but that the president won last November.
“We’re learning a lot from our engagement in Alabama, which I think is going to be helpful to us as we head into the 2018 cycle,” Steven Law, head of Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a recent interview with C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.”
After the race was called, Law praised Trump as the decisive factor in the race, leaving out SLF’s crucial, $4 million investment on behalf of Strange that is largely responsible for Rep. Mo Brooks’ distant third-place finish, at 20 percent.
“We are proud to have strongly supported President Trump’s number-one ally in this race, and we believe the President’s support will be decisive as we head into the next phase of this campaign,” Law said in a statement.
Trump can surely claim some credit for Strange’s runner-up status ahead of Brooks. The president tweeted a few times urging Republicans to turn out and vote for Strange, he recorded a robo-call for him, and his designated outside group, America First Policies, funded a late digital advertising campaign for the senator.
The endorsement and the political activity that accompanied it might have innoculated Strange from attacks leveled by the congressman, Moore and others that he is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s establishment toady. Now, the question is whether it works well enough to push Strange past Moore in the runoff.
The Republican establishment, sparring with Trump on multiple fronts, especially his handling of the demonstrations by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., and ensuing counter protests that left one person dead and several injured, are putting aside their differences with Trump in Alabama and betting all their chips on the president.
“President Trump’s pick for Senate successfully advanced to the runoff election, and we are confident he will be elected to remain in the Senate come December,” said Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado in a statement. Gardner is chairman of the NRSC, the Senate GOP campaign arm.
Moore overperformed the RealClearPolitics average by 8 percentage points, a more formidable finish that supporters of Strange expected earlier in the campaign. Moore is an ardent opponent of same-sex marriage and was removed as Alabama chief justice for refusing to honor the decision of federal courts. He’s run for office before but never won, which suggests that his focus on social issues limits his support.
But Moore’s stronger-than-expected first place finish on Tuesday means that Republican insiders can’t take a Strange runoff victory for granted. The senator will have Trump on his side — and America First Policies, which hinted in a congratulatory statement that it plans to be active in the race.
However, expect McConnell and SLF, plus its affiliated political nonprofit One Nation, to do the heavy lifting. The group is part of the Senate majority leader’s plan to inject itself into party primaries in the midterm to protect incumbents, which Strange is, and to ensure the nomination of electable conservatives in primaries.
Moore’s provocative rhetoric doesn’t fit the mold of a Republican McConnell wants on his roster in 2018. Among Moore’s greatest hits, he said recently in an interview with The Guardian that the U.S. might be the epicenter of evil in “the modern world because of “same-sex marriage.
Asked how he felt about the fact that his position on marriage is similar to that of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, Moore said: “Well, maybe Putin is right … Maybe he’s more akin to me than I know.”
Moore is virtually running against McConnell, promising to be a thorn in his side if elected to the Senate. A loss in Alabama could diminish McConnell’s clout in primaries next year, in Arizona and Nevada, where Sens. Jeff Flake and Dean Heller, respectively, have to fend off intraparty competition, and in those states with Democratic incumbents that Trump won in 2016.
“There’s a universal desire to avoid the mistakes of the past when Republicans nominated candidates like Todd Akin, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, who all lost, and we don’t want to do that again,” a Republican insider said.
This Republican operative was referring to three nominees who blew winnable general elections — Akin in Missouri in 2012, and Angle in Nevada and O’Donnell in Delaware in 2010. After those experiences, McConnell dropped his hands-off approach to GOP Senate primaries.
In 2014, McConnell, at that time through the NRSC, the Senate campaign arm, began meddling in primaries on behalf of incumbents and against flawed candidates who had the support of the grassroots but might put a seat in jeopardy in the general election.
