Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore smiles before announcing his candidacy for U.S. Senate in Montgomery, Ala. |
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A new poll shows an increasingly wide gap in the primary race for Alabama’s Senate seat.The survey from the Trafalgar Group shows former State Chief Justice Roy Moore has 35% support.
Luther Strange — who was appointed to fill the seat left by Attorney General Jeff Sessions earlier this year — has 23% of the vote.
He also has the support of President Trump but other Republican leaders are split on their support.
Congressman Mo Brooks rounds out the top three with 20%.
This is the largest lead in a poll for Moore, as previous data has shown just a single digit lead for him.
Could Republican Infighting Send the ‘Ayatollah of Alabama’ to the Senate?
Alabama
Republicans are holding a primary election next week to choose their
replacement candidate in the Senate for Jeff Sessions. Until recently,
the widespread expectation was that in the outcome of the three-horse
race between appointed incumbent Luther Strange, U.S. Representative Mo
Brooks, and suspended Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, either
Strange or Brooks would survive this round of voting to make it to the
September 26 runoff election. The survivor would defeat Moore, then roll
over whatever paper candidate the Democrats proffered in the general.
Moore’s universal name ID and dedicated conservative Evangelical
following seemed certain to guarantee him a spot in the September 26
runoff, though the heavy spending of Strange and Brooks opened the
possibility that they’d squeeze Moore, who has never been much of a
fundraiser, into third place. After all, the last time Moore ran for a
nonjudicial position, in the 2010 governor’s race, he finished a very disappointing fourth in the primary.
But
now, the dynamics of the primary are beginning to resemble one of those
murder-suicide scenarios where two candidates damage each other so much
that a third eclipses both of them. Strange and Brooks have been going
after each other with claw hammers from the get-go, with the former
benefiting from massive spending by national party groups controlled by his colleague Mitch McConnell, and the latter accusing
his appointed rival of being a puppet of the hated Washington
Establishment. Both campaigns have largely ignored Roy Moore. Other than
posturing over who’s the truest conservative of them all, there aren’t
many actual issues dividing the three candidates.
A new robo-poll
of Alabama Republicans shows Moore holding a comfortable lead over his
rivals with 30 percent, to 22 percent for Strange and 19 percent for
Brooks. That’s not particularly new; Moore has led most of the polls in
this race. What’s new is that the judge’s approval ratios are vastly
better than those of the two main combatants in the race: Moore is at
53/34; Strange is at 35/50; and Brooks is at 31/43. The nastiness
between Strange and Brooks could get even worse down the stretch, as a
wealthy Brooks backer invests in ads
accusing Strange of a corrupt deal with disgraced former governor Robert
Bentley to secure his appointment (Strange was attorney general at the
time, and was supposedly investigating Bentley for the personal and
financial irregularities that eventually forced him to resign).
Suddenly,
it’s not so hard to envision Moore winning the runoff, as embittered
supporters of the major candidate who finishes third stay home or
gravitate to the judge.
If
Moore does win the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate, Alabama
opinion-leaders will have to take a good look at themselves and decide
whether they really want to be represented at the highest levels of
government for six long years by a grim theocrat who was removed from his chief justice position once for insisting on displaying the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, and then suspended
years later because he refused to accept the U.S. Supreme Court’s
decision legalizing same-sex marriage. The man known as the “Ayatollah
of Alabama” isn’t likely to burnish the reputation of his state as a
sane and safe place to do business.
Indeed,
a Moore nomination could even create the possibility of something even
more unimaginable than his election: a viable Democratic candidacy in
the general election scheduled for December 12. Unfortunately, Democrats
have their own unusual problem this year: In all the polls, the
consensus Democratic Establishment candidate, former U.S. Attorney Doug
Jones, is badly trailing
an unknown African-American businessman from Mobile with the fortunate
name of Robert Kennedy Jr. It looks like Jones will at best need a
runoff to gain the nomination, if, er, RFK — with no campaign staff,
treasury, or so far, platform — doesn’t win outright.
Yes, it could be a wild ride for Alabama this year.
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