If he is elected to the Senate, Mr. Moore will have gotten there as a rare retail politician with a penchant for reciting Blackstone’s Commentaries on common law. At the same time, and to greater political benefit, Mr. Moore, a former professional kickboxer, exhibits traits that many Alabamians see in themselves and seek in their elected officials: He is outwardly pious and prone to political pugilism, self-assured and satisfied with standing alone.

“Roy Moore is Huey Long with religion,” said Jim Zeigler, a Republican who is the state auditor. “Huey Long would tell it like it is. He ran against the establishment, he defeated the establishment, he would not compromise with the establishment. Roy Moore does all those things, but he has a biblical worldview.”

Yet Mr. Moore, who twice ran unsuccessfully for governor, is far from universally beloved in this state. For many people in Alabama, he remains part novelty, part demagogue and part embarrassment, his reputation marred not by bribes or sex scandals but by his brand of stubborn populism. More than once, Mr. Moore has found himself rebuffing comparisons to George C. Wallace, the governor who said in 1963 that he wanted “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”

Mr. Moore is “a one-issue man, and all of the other things fall to the side,” said Joel Sogol, a lawyer from Tuscaloosa who has tangled with Mr. Moore. “Either you accept those issues from his position or you don’t, and there’s a lot of folks here who accept them.”

Mr. Moore’s fame stems almost entirely from years of pitched legal battles over Ten Commandments displays on public property and over the authority of the federal courts to recognize same-sex marriages. Cast aside, even by some in his own party, as a bigot and a hatemonger, Mr. Moore has turned high-decibel clashes with his critics — he blamed “atheists, homosexuals and transgender individuals” for one conflagration — into opportunities.

In Alabama politics, Mr. Sogol said: “He’s an outsider who has a flag to hold on to. His flag is Christianity, the Bible. There are a lot of people in this area who think that is the No. 1 thing in the world.”