GOP voters make choices in Alabama, Utah contests
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Alabama’s Ten Commandments judge, Roy Moore, has forced a Senate primary runoff against Sen. Luther Strange, who was backed by President Trump. The outcome sets up a September showdown between the Republican Party’s cultural conservatives and those now running Congress.
In another key race, the mayor of Provo, Utah, won the contest for the Republican nomination Tuesday to fill the seat vacated by retired Rep. Jason Chaffetz against a pair of GOP rivals who portrayed themselves as more ardently conservative.
John Curtis is now well positioned in Utah’s conservative Third Congressional District ahead of the Nov. 7 general election, where he will face a Democrat and several third-party candidates.
Curtis faced hundreds of thousands of dollars in negative super PAC ads that sought to portray him as insufficiently committed to lowering taxes and cutting government spending. Many of them highlighted his 2000 run as a Democrat for a state legislative seat.
But Curtis has won plaudits since taking office as mayor in 2010.
In Alabama, evangelical voters cherish Moore as a culture-war icon after he was twice stripped of his chief justice duties, for refusing to remove a biblical monument he installed in a state judiciary building and for resisting federal gay marriage rulings.
On Tuesday, the firebrand jurist rode a tide of antiestablishment sentiment to secure more votes than Strange for the seat previously held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Despite millions of dollars in advertising by a super political action committee tied to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Strange trailed Moore by about six percentage points, according to unofficial returns.
“This is a great victory. The attempt by the silk-stocking Washington elitists to control the vote of the people of Alabama has failed,” Moore said at his victory party in downtown Montgomery, where a copy of the Ten Commandments was among the decorations.
The winner of the Sept. 26 runoff between Moore and Strange will face Democratic nominee Doug Jones in a December election.
While President Trump endorsed Strange, Moore tried to present himself as the better carrier of Trump’s outsider appeal.
“The takeaway is that Washington is very unpopular,” said Greg Strimple, a Republican pollster for a political action committee aligned with House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“Voters still want change,” Strimple said, and Trump cannot simply “transfer his brand” to candidates who fail to establish their own outsider credentials.