In the first and only debate in the GOP primary run-off to fill Attorney General’s Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat, Luther Strange had one main talking point: “The president’s endorsing me.” As his opponent, the right-wing judge Roy Moore, announced his commitment to countering “political correctness and social experimentation,” cutting taxes and regulations, and returning “virtue and morality” to the United States, Strange returned again and again to the fact that Donald Trump was supporting his bid for the Senate.

The debate on Thursday night in Montgomery, Alabama, laid bare the dynamics of what might be the most fascinating race in this off-election year, one that bodes ill for a Republican Party that is presumably looking forward to the day when Trump is no longer president. Strange, who was appointed interim senator by the scandal-ridden former Governor Robert Bentley in February, has been endorsed by Trump at least a dozen times on Twitter. Meanwhile, Moore has tried to portray the former Alabama attorney general as a member of the establishment: a “professional lobbyist” only concerned with “special interests.” Implicit in that critique is the idea that Trump himself has drifted from the populist agenda on which he campaigned—that he has become one of the creatures of the dreaded swamp.

Both Strange and Moore asserted their devoted support of the president’s agenda, particularly on issues of immigration. And Trump, who won Alabama in 2016 by a margin of nearly 28 points, remains popular there, with favorability ratings of 55 percent as of July. But odds are that Republican voters in Alabama will reject Trump’s chosen candidate when they go to the polls on Tuesday, with a recent poll showing Moore a full eight points ahead of Strange. This would signify a simultaneous rejection of Trump the man and an endorsement of Trumpian politics from some of his most hard-core supporters, marking an evolution in the nativist, anti-establishment movement that Trump kicked off two years ago and that now threatens to eclipse him.

Strange, as little as he may want to admit it, does represent the establishment. As Moore likes to point out, he was a lobbyist before running for office, representing Alabamian corporate interests in Washington, D.C. He then served as the attorney general for Alabama from 2011 to 2017. A prominent member of the historic Republican wave that took control of Alabama’s state government in 2010, he led legal efforts to oppose the Obama administration’s agenda on issues like immigration, the environment, health care, and LGBT rights. Bentley appointed him to Sessions’s seat just as Strange was reportedly gearing up to bring criminal charges against Bentley tied to a scandalous extramarital romance. Shortly after Strange’s appointment, Bentley resigned, pleading guilty to two misdemeanors. Both have denied that the appointment was a corrupt arrangement to stave off more serious charges.







Though a former judge, Moore is more of an outsider. Like Trump, he has shown utter contempt for the rule of law. Moore was notoriously removed from his post as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 after he refused a federal judge’s order to take down a monument of the Ten Commandments that he had installed in the court. He was reinstated to the bench 10 years later, but left when he was suspended without pay for rejecting the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage; his position was that humans were not “at liberty to redefine reality.” He has called Islam a “false religion,” claimed that there is “no such thing as evolution,” and suggested that the September 11 attacks were God’s punishment for America’s sins.