The Post also spoke to three women who dated Moore briefly when they were between 16 and 18 and he was in his thirties. One said he first approached her at 14, and asked her for a date at 16, but her mother refused. Another recalled Moore buying her glasses of wine before she was of legal drinking age. The women said they found the attention flattering at the time but disturbing in retrospect.

“If these allegations are true, he must step aside,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement. A string of other Republican officeholders, including Cory Gardner, who leads the GOP’s Senate campaign, made similar statements. The Atlantic reached out to all 52 Republican senators to ask whether they think Moore should withdraw from the Alabama Senate race, based on the allegations. Nineteen senators responded, all suggesting that if the Washington Post allegations are true, Moore should withdraw from the race.

In a statement, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse said, “The Post’s story is appalling and heartbreaking. If there’s an ounce of truth to any of this, Roy Moore has no place in public life and ought to drop out immediately. Alabamians should start thinking about who they’ll write in but it’s obvious that conservatives deserve better than this.” Florida Senator Marco Rubio called the report “deeply disturbing and, if true, disqualifying.”

Senator John McCain, though, was unequivocal. “The allegations against Roy Moore are deeply disturbing and disqualifying,” he said. “He should immediately step aside and allow the people of Alabama to elect a candidate they can be proud of.”

Moore, who made his name as a crusading moral and religious conservative, denied the allegations. A campaign statement said, “This garbage is the very definition of fake news and intentional defamation.” Moore tried to undercut the story by leaking the accusations to Breitbart News, a sympathetic outlet, ahead of the Post story.

Throughout his career, Moore has argued the nation needs to return to an earlier and more virtuous, God-fearing era. He has spoken thunderously against LGBT rights, even to the point of defying a federal courts.

Voters in Alabama head to the polls on December 12 to elect a new senator. Moore’s opponent is Democrat Doug Jones, and while Alabama is solidly Republican territory, Moore’s controversial and checkered past has given Democrats some hope of winning the seat, even before the Post story.

Moore is only the latest powerful man to be accused of sexual misconduct in recent weeks, part of a flood of revelations since The New York Times and New Yorker chronicled film producer Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misbehavior, including accusations of rape. (Weinstein denies them.) While politics is widely reported to be a hotbed of sexual abuse, no American politician has faced accusations as serious as the ones against Moore since the current flood began.