On Tuesday, Alabama’s Republican voters spoke, and 39 percent of them voted to send principled limited government constitutional conservative Judge Roy Moore to the U.S. Senate, giving Judge Moore a six-point lead over establishment-backed incumbent Senator Luther Strange.
Judge Moore’s win setting up the runoff was all the more remarkable for his campaign being outspent something like 25 to 1, according to the calculations of our friends at Conservative Review.
Incumbent Senator Strange, who was appointed earlier this year to fill the Senate seat vacated by now-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, got a big boost in the final days of the race after President Trump, bowing to pressure from Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, publicly backed him and began recording robocalls for him, urging Alabama GOP voters to support the incumbent.
“In this overwhelmingly Republican state, Mr. Moore is the betting favorite to become the newest United States senator,” our friend Quin Hillyer, who ran as a Republican for a congressional seat in Alabama in 2013, wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times.
Quin is right—the signs for Judge Moore look good; the race is no lock, even in conservative Alabama.
As Fox News observed, Judge Moore first came to national attention in the 1990s as a county judge when he hung a wooden Ten Commandments plaque on the wall of his courtroom. The ACLU filed a lawsuit against him.
Benefiting from his popularity after the episode, Judge Moore then ran and won a race for chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court in 2000. But he was ousted by the establishment after refusing to remove a 5,280-pound granite Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the state judicial building.
He resurrected his political career in 2012, getting elected chief justice again. But his tenure was short-lived again: in 2016, Moore was suspended as chief justice after he directed probate judges not to issue marriage certificates to gay couples.
These stands for the Judeo-Christian legal principles upon which American was founded have made Judge Roy Moore immensely popular with conservatives in Alabama, and indeed across the country, but they have also made him a prime target for the Republican Party’s secular establishment, thus the 25-1 spending differential between Moore and incumbent Luther Strange.
However, that has not deterred Roy Moore from standing for and campaigning on Judeo-Christian principles.
During an appearance on Fox and Friends yesterday, Judge Moore said he would continue to emphasize the cultural issues if elected.
“These are the things I’ve stood up for, and I’ve suffered accordingly by the judicial inquiry commission of Alabama,” he said. “But I’ll continue to uphold the Constitution, and the right to acknowledge God.”
Despite the fact that President Trump endorsed his incumbent rival, on the campaign trail, Moore has made it clear he will be a reliable ally to the president and continue to hold to his anti-establishment principles.
And his battles over principle have made him enormously popular with his base of Christian conservatives, but the race is, as we said, far from over.
Establishment political operatives expect the McConnell-backed Senate Leadership Fund to “be heavily engaged” on Strange’s behalf over the next six weeks, reports Fox. McConnell’s super PAC and other establishment-controlled groups spent millions in negative advertising against Judge Moore ahead of Tuesday’s vote.
“WE’RE ON TO THE RUNOFF! Time for Conservatives across Alabama to unite and deliver a knockout punch to the establishment! #ALSen,” Judge Moore tweeted Tuesday night, after the race was called.
But it will take more than conservative unity to defeat the millions of special interest dollars that are already flowing into incumbent Senator Strange’s campaign war chest.
Judge Roy Moore is the real deal: a Bible-believing Christian and a constitutional originalist who lives the values he campaigns on and will not be intimidated or bought by the Washington establishment. We urge all our conservative—populist friends in Alabama to unite behind Roy Moore, and all our readers across the country to support his campaign at roymoore.org. {eoa}
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