US awaits toxic Alabama poll

Republican candidate denies sexually molesting teen girls

The US Senate race wrenching Alabama and testing the Republican Party’s character neared its tumultuous conclusion Monday, with President Donald Trump urging loyalists to elect Roy Moore despite accusations he molested minors decades ago.

Voters in this traditionally conservative southern state will take to the polls Tuesday to pick their newest senator, to replace Jeff Sessions who was named US attorney general earlier this year.

“I need Alabama to go vote for Roy Moore,” Trump said in a robocall to voters that began Sunday, declaring the candidate would help stop illegal immigration, rebuild a stronger military and protect pro-life values.

“But if Alabama elects liberal Democrat Doug Jones, all of our progress will be stopped full.”

Until recently it had been unimaginable for a Republican to lose statewide election in Alabama, which Trump carried handily and which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992.

But Moore is unlike just about any Republican. Polls show he no longer enjoys the commanding advantage he held before the Washington Post published the first of multiple accusations by women who claim Moore sexually molested or pursued them when they were in their teens and he was a state attorney in his thirties.

Moore, now 70, denies all the allegations.

“I never molested anyone,” Moore declared in a local interview published Sunday. “I don’t know why they’re saying it, but it’s not true.”

Moore has twice been elected chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, and twice dismissed from the post, first in 2003 for refusing an order to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse.

In 2016, he defied the US Supreme Court by refusing to apply its decision legalizing same-sex marriage.

Some in the Republican establishment have sought to distance themselves from Moore, and as a signal of the lack of enthusiasm, pro-Moore campaign signs outside residents’ homes are seldom seen.

But with Republicans clinging to a razor-thin majority in the US Senate, Trump – after weeks of stalling – has given Moore his political blessing.

It’s a pragmatic alliance between the president’s economic populism and Moore’s religious activism.