Roy Moore's campaign manager has said the candidate is not yet conceding the US Senate race to winner Democrat Doug Jones, and is asking his supporters to pray for him.

Rich Hobson told a sombre crowd at Mr Moore's election night gathering that: "Some people are calling it. We are not calling it."

Mr Hobson said the margin is thin and there are still votes to be counted. Mr Moore also came out on stage and said that he would not be conceding, telling campaign supporters “it's not over.”

“It's going to take some time,” the candidate said during a brief appearance before supporters.

Campaign chairman Bill Armistead says that because the vote is close and approaching the state's recount requirement, “we do not have a final decision on the outcome.”

Alabama state law calls for a recount if the margin of victory is less than one-half of one percentage point. With all precincts reporting, Jones leads by 1.5 percentage points — three times what's required to trigger a recount.

If the secretary of state determines there were more write-in votes than the difference between Mr Jones and Mr Moore, the state's counties would be required to tally those votes. It's not clear how that would help Mr Moore, who ended the night trailing Mr Jones by more than 20,000 votes.

As a Republican running in deeply conservative Alabama, Mr Moore was initially seen as all but certain to win his campaign. But the race was upended by a series of women alleging that Mr Moore had made advances on them when he was in his 30s and they were teenagers, including multiple women who accused him of assault — one when she was 14 years old.

Mr Moore has always adamantly denied all allegations, saying that “I have never engaged in sexual misconduct” and decrying what he called a partisan effort to derail his campaign.

Despite those denials, much of the party renounced Mr Moore. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, called on him to leave the race, prompting Mr Moore to turn his fire on the Republican establishment, and on the eve of the election senior Alabama Senator Richard Shelby said Alabama “deserves better” and relayed he had not voted for Mr Moore.

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Should Mr Moore prevail, Republicans will be faced with a decision they have spent weeks bracing for: how to treat a new member of their caucus who, despite being crucial to their slender majority, is saddled with politically explosive allegations. In the lead-up to the election senators had discussed launching an ethics investigation or even voting to expel Mr Moore should he win.

But even as Mr McConnell and others sought to distance themselves from Mr Moore, the embattled candidate was buoyed by support from other quarters of the party.

After initially severing ties, the Republican National Committee reversed itself and again directed funding to Mr Moore.

Even before sexual misconduct allegations against Mr Moore emerged, he was a controversial figure. He was twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for defying the law, once for refusing to take down a monument to the Ten Commandments and once for ordering state judges to enforce Alabama’s ban on same-sex marriage despite the United States Supreme Court overruling state law in declaring same-sex marriage legal.

He has also argued a Muslim elected official should not be allowed serve in Congress, embraced a discredited conspiracy theory by questioning whether Barack Obama was born in the United States and called homosexual conduct “abhorrent” and “a crime against nature” that should be illegal.

Like much of the Republican establishment, Mr Trump backed the more moderate Republican Luther Strange in the primary election before swinging his support to Mr Moore after he won the party’s nomination.