Out of 100 members of the United States Senate, precisely one man—Alabama’s Jeff Sessions—endorsed candidate Donald Trump while the Republican presidential nomination was hotly contested. So it’s not terribly surprising that the Senate GOP primary to replace President Trump’s attorney general is pitting a Trumpist candidate against a Trump-endorsed candidate.
On Thursday night, the two candidates vying for Trump’s mantle faced off in the only debate before Tuesday’s runoff election. The Trump-endorsed candidate, former Alabama attorney general and incumbent senator Luther Strange, spent much of the debate touting Trump’s endorsement.
“If you do not follow the president on Twitter, I urge you to do so,” Strange said in his opening remarks, directing viewers to kind tweets the president had made about him. Strange let it be known that he and Trump had spoken for 30 minutes Wednesday night and have “developed a close, personal friendship.”
The most important question in the race, according to Strange, is: “Who’s most qualified to ensure the president’s agenda is accomplished in Washington?” And how could voters know the answer to that question? Just look at who Trump endorsed, Strange said, for evidence of who could help Trump get The Wall built.
“He’s angry and I’m angry at the lack of progress in Washington,” said Strange, who opined that Trump was elected “through divine intervention.” Strange said he got involved in politics because of Sessions, whom he casually referred to as “Jeff.”
Meanwhile, the Trumpist candidate, former Alabama Supreme Court judge Roy Moore, spoke out against illegal immigrants, free-trade agreements, judicial supremacy, and “transgender troops in our bathrooms.”
More than anything else, Moore is known for his unbending Christian conservatism—something certainly not associated with the former social liberal from New York who currently resides in the White House. Moore is a hero to many religious conservatives in Alabama for having been removed from the state Supreme Court not once, but twice: The first time for defying a court order to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments and the second for defying the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage ruling. He’s also strongly disliked by some Alabama Republicans and ran nearly 10 points behind Mitt Romney on the 2012 ballot. On Thursday, CNN published quotes and video of Moore saying in 2005 and 2015 that sodomy should be illegal. “I don’t get into that,” Moore said in 2015 when asked what the legal punishment for homosexual acts should be.
Moore’s extreme social conservatism calls into question what people really mean when they talk about “Trumpism.” At a rally for Moore after the debate, former Trump aide Sebastian Gorka, who was pushed out of the White House last month, talked about Moore as a representative of the original, populist Trumpian agenda. But Gorka’s efforts to link Moore with Trump were strained at times. “We put a man into office who believes in three things: God, family, country,” Gorka said of Trump. (Well, one out of three ain’t bad.)
But if Moore’s beliefs don’t align perfectly with Trump’s, his temperament does: He’s anti-establishment and bombastic and sometimes takes a conspiratorial approach to politics. Moore painted Strange as a tool of the “elitist, Washington establishment”—a former lobbyist who was hand-picked by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and disgraced former governor Robert Bentley. (Strange was appointed to the Senate by Bentley, who resigned this spring in the wake of scandals that Strange’s office had been investigating.)
“I want to see virtue and morality returned to our country,” Moore said Thursday night. For all the focus on Trump, Moore’s attacks on Strange’s appointment by a disgraced former governor were a reminder of how important local dynamics are in a race the national media see only as part of the broader civil war between the establishment and populist Republicans.
The Lincoln-Douglas debate format also revealed that the lack of a moderator can have a real downside. Moore sometimes read from notes, and although Moore asked Strange about the timing and propriety of various actions he took prior to his appointment to the Senate, Strange simply avoided the questions in a way that he couldn’t have if a moderator had been pressing him for answers.
The Strange-Moore debate could only be confused with the original Lincoln-Douglas debates if neither Lincoln nor Douglas had been particularly good at speaking and each man had been primarily concerned with talking about how great James Buchanan was.
With just a few days until the runoff, Moore leads Strange by about 9 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. So why is Trump risking his credibility by campaigning for the underdog Strange this weekend? That’s not entirely clear. But if Moore wins, Trump can accurately say that the candidate who claimed to be the most like Trump actually won. And if Strange wins, Trump can show Republicans throughout the country that he can close a nearly double-digit gap in a Republican primary through the sheer force of his endorsement.
For Trump, at least, the Alabama Senate runoff is a can’t-lose proposition.
