“They’re pulling out all the old classics for this one,” said Gordon Harvey, a history professor at Jacksonville State University in Alabama.

While Mr. Jones has not said anything nearly as incendiary as Mr. Moore has, he has attempted some political jujitsu amid the campaign’s racial politics, sending out a mailer featuring an African-American that read: “Think if a black man went after high school girls anyone would try to make him a senator?”

No, Mr. Browder said, he had simply never seen so many volatile elements packed into a political moment. Then he thought for a minute.

“I see parallels with one,” he said. “George Wallace.”

Wallace, the fiery segregationist governor, comes up often here these days. He was by turns an avid boxer, a circuit judge with lofty ambitions, a state leader who blatantly flouted federal authority, a symbol of defiance to the direction of the national culture, a hero to many rural and small-town whites and a politician who ran national campaigns on a promise to “send them a message” — all descriptions that perfectly fit Mr. Moore.

Mr. Wallace was a Democrat, and his use of race was far more overt and central. Yet when political veterans are pushed to come up with analogous races, they often turn to Wallace’s successful 1970 run for governor, where he took on, as a national newspaper column put it, “an unholy coalition of the Republican and Democratic national parties, militant blacks and country club millionaires, the White House and Alabama liberals.” Aside from the White House, at least since President Trump endorsed his candidacy, this is much the same crowd that Mr. Moore has taken on.

Still, those who knew Wallace well are quick to point out that the messages may be delivered in much the same style, but the messengers are not so alike.