Alabama Senate Race: Jeff Sessions Fights to Reclaim Seat

But that restraint may not hold between now and the runoff. Given Mr. Sessions’ lackluster showing on Tuesday, Mr. Tuberville’s allies are expected to push the White House to endorse him over Mr. Sessions. That could further damage Mr. Sessions given how much influence the president’s word can have in Republican primaries.

More often when voters turn away from a politician with a long record and a reservoir of good will, legal or ethical wrongdoing or a personal scandal has left them sour. In Mr. Sessions’s case, the opposite was true. Legal scholars and Justice Department lawyers agreed that he properly recused himself from overseeing the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign because he had been a close adviser to Mr. Trump during the election. Mr. Trump fired him in November 2018 and Mr. Sessions stayed largely quiet, until announcing his Senate campaign almost exactly one year later.

In the eyes of Mr. Trump and his supporters — and the campaign message of Mr. Sessions’s primary opponents — the former attorney general’s offense was that he had not done enough to protect the president. The ethics of the recusal, as far as they were concerned, were either irrelevant or misrepresented by enemies of the president.

Even before Mr. Sessions announced that he would run, the primary was dominated by effusive demonstrations of support for Mr. Trump. The candidates rarely saw an issue they did not try to use as a way to prove their fealty to the president. As the House of Representatives prepared to impeach the president in October, Mr. Byrne was one of several Republicans who barged into a closed Intelligence Committee meeting and started shouting at Representative Adam B. Schiff, the chairman and a leader of the Democratic impeachment effort.

Mr. Tuberville campaigned across the state saying that his biggest reason for wanting to serve in Washington was “to help Donald Trump.” In his first television ad, he declared that the president was a gift from the divine. “God sent us Donald Trump because God knew we were in trouble,” he says, promising to go to Washington to help build the Trump border wall and drain the proverbial swamp.

A fourth Republican candidate, Roy S. Moore, was on track to finish a distant fourth place. The nomination of Mr. Moore, a former judge who was accused of forcing himself on teenage girls, set into motion the series of events that led to Mr. Jones’s improbable victory. No Democrat had been elected to the Senate from Alabama in a generation.

Mr. Sessions’s assumption going into the race was that his decades of service in Alabama — he was first elected to the Senate in 1996 and served as state attorney general for two years before that — would help him overcome any stain on his reputation from his falling out with the president. On the campaign trail, he played the role of the seasoned pragmatist who would defend the Trump agenda because he understood and valued it better than anyone.



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