In Alabama, Roy Moore’s supporters are used to the attacks, a dynamic working in the Republican Senate nominee’s favor as he weathers allegations of sexual misconduct a month before a key special election.
A fresh poll conducted Thursday evening, within hours of the bombshell report, showed Moore’s steady lead had evaporated. In the survey for Decision Desk HQ, he and Democratic nominee Doug Jones were tied at 46 percent. The error margin was 4.3 percentage points.
But it’s unclear what impact the accusations will have in deep red Alabama, where President Trump is popular and anger with the political establishment in Washington is running high.
Voting for a Democrat might be untenable for rank and file conservatives, and Moore’s backers are uncommonly loyal. To them, he is the arch-enemy of the establishment. They have stuck with him through years of controversy, including two ejections from the Alabama Supreme Court because he refused to honor federal court rulings.
Republican voter Johnny Creel, 56, said flatly that he doesn’t believe the charges, which Moore vehemently denies. Creel, who runs an insurance agency in suburban Birmingham, plans to attend a campaign rally for Moore on Saturday, and contribute $1,000 as a symbol of his faith in the candidate.
“I think it’s not true, I really do,” Creel said Friday in a telephone interview with the Washington Examiner. “This poor girl is probably under a lot of pressure, financially, and somebody approached her.”
In a Washington Post expose, published Thursday, a woman is accusing Moore of engaging in sexual activity with her 40 years ago, when he was 32 and she was 14, two years under the legal age of consent in Alabama. Other women make similar accusations in the story. They also were teenagers at the time, but old enough to consent under the law.
All of the women went on the record in the story. It wasn’t enough for Creel, who supported Rep. Mo Brooks in round one of the Republican primary and then voted for Moore over appointed Sen. Luther Strange in the late September runoff.
“The ‘news’ that broke about the judge is a load of garbage. If he was guilty of sexually assaulting a 14 year-old then we would have known about it long ago,” Creel said. “Besides, we have a ton of reporters here in Alabama who have loved to nail Roy Moore. Why did none of them uncover this scoop? Typical dirty tricks if you ask me.”
The winner of the Dec. 12 special general election will finish the remainder of the six-year term that runs through 2020 and was vacated by popular Republican Jeff Sessions, who resigned from the Senate in January to become U.S. attorney general.
A Democratic victory would be a major upset, regardless of the circumstances, and cut the GOP’s already thin Senate majority down to one seat.
High-profile Republicans in Alabama were sticking by Moore. So was Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and chairman of Breitbart News who championed his candidacy in a proxy war with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who endorsed Strange.
McConnell and other Republicans in Washington were continuing to distance themselves from Moore on Friday, with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asking that his image be removed from Moore fundraising materials and the party’s Senate campaign arm, the NRSC, pulling out of a fundraising arrangement with the nominee.
Creel said he would join the exodus if he believed the allegations against Moore were true. “I would never support anybody who did what he was accused of,” he said, adding that, it happened: “If he can’t be thrown in jail, he should at least be thrown in the street.”
