Mobile, Ala. — After hyperventilating through last December’s special-election version of a house of horrors, Alabama voters shrugged their collective shoulders this spring at allegations from disparate sources that Kay Ivey, the incumbent governor, is a lesbian prone to slurred speech who attends too many cocktail parties.

Ms. Ivey, who is 73, ascended from the lieutenant governorship in 2017 when Gov. Robert Bentley resigned following a sex scandal. She avoided almost all public campaigning for Tuesday’s Republican primary, while protecting a steady polling lead. She eschewed candidate debates and retail politicking, while running campaign ads showing her shooting a gun and “protecting” historic monuments from the ravages of Washington “special interests.” And she assured local voters that she had “accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.”

She didn’t, however, take the lead on much of anything during her 14 months in office. Sure, she could claim Alabama’s lowest unemployment rate ever — almost exactly tracking the national numbers — but without specifying anything she had done to achieve that success.

And when a reactionary state school board engineered the ouster of the reformist state school superintendent after he had spent less than a year on the job, Ms. Ivey, the board’s president (ex officio), avoided the meetings.