Roy Moore over the years

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore announces his plans to run for U.S. Senate Wednesday, April 26, 2017, on the steps of the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., during a press conference. (Julie Bennett/jbennett@al.com)

In Alabama, history doesn't repeat itself. It stutters.

Tell me, does this seem familiar to you, too?

Forced from office, Roy Moore is trying to stage a political comeback.

In the GOP primary with him are two other serious candidates: a silk-stocking Republican appointed by Robert Bentley and a hard-right conservative with a history of dumb things coming out of his mouth.

Both of Moore's opponents think, if they make it into a runoff, they can beat him.

Only they don't make the runoff. At least not last the last time we were here.

Because that was 2012 in a special election for the Alabama Supreme Court.

Back then, Moore faced Chuck Malone, whom Bentley appointed to the Alabama Supreme Court to replace Sue Bell Cobb, who had abruptly quit her job as chief justice. The other candidate was "Charcoal" Charlie Graddick, who when asked what he thought of the death penalty once said we should "fry them until their eyes bug out."

The conventional wisdom then was that Moore could pull enough votes to get into a runoff, but not enough to win a runoff. Graddick and Malone saw the primary election as a two-way race with each other to get into a two-way runoff with Moore.

Except neither of them made it. Instead, Moore beat them both without a runoff, eeking across the finish line with 50.36 percent of the vote GOP vote.

And then the wheel of time turned again. Victory, defeat, repeat.

Which brings us to where we are today.

Forced from office again, Moore again is believed to be a front-runner in a field of 11 Republicans running for the United States Senate. His two biggest competitors are a silk-stocking Bentley appointee, Luther Strange, and a bomb-throwing conservative who doesn't always mind what comes out of his mouth, Mo Brooks.

Let me preface this with a whole shaker full of salt. The only polling numbers floating around are second-hand and mostly stuff done by lobbyists wondering who to put their money on. But those second-hand numbers seems consistent.

Most I've heard show Moore in the low 30s, but above all the rest. That's very good news for him.

Behind Moore are Strange, somewhere in the mid teens to low 20s, and Brooks in the mid teens.

State Sen. Trip Pittman lags a distant, but not alarming, fourth place in the single digits.

Most everybody else isn't on the radar, at least not yet.

There's a lot of time for things to change between now and the August primary, but this thing bears an uncanny resemblance to Moore's 2012 race for chief justice.

The other element you have to consider here is that this is a special election. There won't be anyone else on this ballot to pull voters to the polls. The candidates in this race alone must draw people in.

Which plays to Moore's favor.

There's no delicate way to put this. Moore's supporters can best be described as passionate-but-crazy. I'm not knocking crazy here. Look who's in the White House. Passionate-but-crazy voters can get you places.

Meanwhile, Strange's base is ... well, sensible-but-ambivalent, the type of voter who was really going to vote for that guy, only they needed to pick up groceries from the store and there's only so many hours in a day. And no matter how many trigger-happy I-got-endorsed-by-the-NRA ads he runs on TV, he's not going to erase the fact that he got appointed to the job by a man he was supposed to be investigating.

Brooks' base probably lands somewhere in the middle of Moore and Strange, but with his supporters highly concentrated in the northern part of the state (as opposed to Strange's base, who're highly concentrated in Washington, D.C.)

If you're Brooks, you have to be thinking, if you can pull Strange down just a few points, you can pick up his supporters in a two-way runoff against Moore.

If you're Strange, you have to be wondering how you keep Brooks boxed into his congressional district in north Alabama.

If either attacks Moore, they only energize Moore's base.

If they ignore Moore, they risk him beating them both at the same time.

The GOP primary is looking like it's Moore's race to lose. That's good news for Moore. And that's good news for Democrats.

In 2012, Moore won the GOP primary with 50.36 percent of the vote, but in the general election, against Democrat Bob Vance he won with only 51.8 percent of the vote.

To give you some perspective, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were on the same ballot. Romney carried the state with 60.55 percent of the vote. About nine percent of Alabama voters split their tickets to vote for Vance.

In the end, Moore still won, but he is soft and maybe even beatable.

But only if history doesn't repeat itself.

A previous version of this column stated incorrectly that Brooks had not run for statewide office before. In fact, he ran for lieutenant governor in 2006 and a correction has been made.