President Trump played a surprisingly small role in the Republican primary for the Alabama Senate seat held by Jeff Sessions before he became attorney general.
The question is whether Trump will be a bigger factor in the runoff a few weeks from now. The candidate Trump endorsed, Senator Luther Strange, finished a solid second in Tuesday’s primary and will face former Judge Roy Moore, who came in first, in a September 26 runoff.
With 91 percent of the vote tallied, Moore had 39.6 percent, Strange 32.1 percent, and U.S. Representative Mo Brooks 19.8 percent.
The story of the campaign, given the media’s obsession with Trump, has been the president. First, it was whether he would intervene and back a candidate at all. Then 10 days ago, he tweeted his endorsement of Strange. Now the focus is on what Trump will do to aid Strange in the runoff.
Why is Trump so important in this race? It’s simple: he is enormously popular in Alabama. He won the state in 2016 with 63 percent of the vote. Since then, his approval rating among Republican voters has climbed to between 85 percent and 90 percent.
To boost Strange, Trump taped a robocall to GOP voters the evening before the primary vote. In the runoff, he will certainly be asked to do more, including appear at a pro-Strange rally in Alabama. “We believe the president’s support will be decisive as we head into the next phase,” said Steven Law, the head of the Senate Leadership Fund.
The fund is associated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and it spent millions for TV ads backing Strange and attacking Brooks. The ads cited Brooks’s harsh criticism of Trump when he backed Ted Cruz in the presidential race. Brooks fired back by denouncing McConnell and the Washington establishment.
Strange and the fund didn’t go after Moore until late in the primary campaign however. He has a loyal following among conservative and Christian evangelicals. He was twice elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. And he was twice ousted from that post.
But Moore is a formidable candidate. In his case, the question is whether he’s reached his ceiling with just under 40 percent of the vote. (Which was roughly five points higher than he was getting in polls.)
With his large following, Moore is able to win elections while spending far less than other candidates. But he may have a Trump problem, like Brooks did. Only with Moore, it has been the candidate’s wife, Kayla. In January, she posted an article entitled “Dear Christians, If You Vote For A Godless Man, You
Are Asking for Trump.” Alabama has become a Republican state, as strongly controlled by the GOP today as it once was by Democrats. As a result, the Republican nominee in a statewide race has a built-in advantage: No Democrat has gotten more than 40 percent of the vote in a Senate contest in Alabama since 1996.
But there’s a fear among Republicans, particularly the establishment types, that Moore would be vulnerable to defeat by a Democrat in the general election. And Democrats nominated former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones in their Senate primary.
Strange, twice elected state attorney general and a sitting senator, would engender no such concerns.
