The Republican Senate primary runoff in Alabama crystallizes how two midterm election themes seem to be at odds: Many Republican voters deeply trust President Trump’s judgment on endorsements, and many are hungry for outsiders.
On Tuesday, voters in Alabama will choose between Representative Barry Moore, who secured the president’s endorsement in January and is running as an unflagging Trump loyalist, and Jared Hudson, a former Navy SEAL and political newcomer running an anti-establishment campaign.
Little about the primary race has gone as expected. The early front-runner, Steve Marshall, the state attorney general, slipped in the polls after Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Moore. Then, Mr. Marshall missed the runoff altogether, finishing about 15 percentage points behind Mr. Moore and about one point behind Mr. Hudson in the May 19 primary.
Now some polls show Mr. Hudson leading in the runoff, though survey data is limited.
“We may have switched the front-runners three times,” Bill Armistead, a former chair of the Alabama Republican Party, said with a chuckle. “On the one hand, the weight of the president’s endorsement has put Barry Moore where he is,” Mr. Armistead said. But on the other, Mr. Hudson’s outsider pitch has “really caught on with the people of Alabama.”
The election will decide a successor to Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican who is vacating his seat to run for governor. Both Senate candidates say they have no significant points of disagreement with the president, and both celebrate his performance during his second term. But Mr. Moore, who has called Mr. Trump the “greatest president in my lifetime,” has particularly deep connections to him.
Mr. Moore, 59, was a state lawmaker in 2015 and endorsed Mr. Trump early during his first run for president, declaring his support at a rally in Mobile, Ala., just two months after Mr. Trump rode down the golden Trump Tower escalator.
Mr. Trump, in turn, endorsed the congressman early in the Senate race, saying on Truth Social that Mr. Moore had “been with me from the very beginning,” and that he was a “good friend, fighter, and WINNER.”
Mr. Moore, a third-term congressman from a deeply conservative district in the southern part of the state, has put that endorsement at the heart of his campaign.
His campaign website opens to a pop-up video of Mr. Trump speaking about Mr. Moore and describes the candidate as a “Trump Conservative.” He speaks about using relationships with the White House to help Alabama, and he says he will fight for the administration.
“When I call the president, he takes our calls, and those sort of things matter,” Mr. Moore said in an interview, dismissing Mr. Hudson’s campaign as empty talk. “There’s rhetoric. And there’s a record.”
On Thursday, Mr. Trump joined Mr. Moore for a virtual rally that almost 40,000 people joined, according to the Moore campaign.
Mr. Hudson’s campaign website lays out few policies. But he has said he wants to take on the system, in part by instituting 12-year term limits for members of both chambers of Congress. He has also said Mr. Moore is trying to “ride the coattails” of the president to the Senate.
“The people of Alabama understand that they elect their next senator — not the president, not anybody else,” Mr. Hudson, 40, said in an interview. He has nonetheless cast himself as the candidate who has more in common with Mr. Trump. “The people of Alabama love President Trump, and they voted for President Trump to make sure they had an outsider and a fighter.”
Mr. Hudson, who ran for Jefferson County sheriff in 2022 and was the first candidate to join the Senate race, is seeking to overcome the president’s imposing endorsement track record this year.
The president has proved to be a kingmaker in Southern states: Among his successes were endorsements of primary challengers to Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, two sitting Republicans who lost their bids for re-election.
Still, Mr. Trump’s run of endorsement wins hit a snag two weeks ago in Iowa, where voters rejected his chosen candidate for governor, Representative Randy Feenstra, in favor of Zach Lahn, another conservative contender who ran as a political outsider.
And Mr. Trump has missed in Senate races in Alabama before.
In 2022, he initially endorsed Representative Mo Brooks for Senate but then pulled the endorsement as Mr. Brooks struggled to gain traction. And in 2017, he endorsed Senator Luther Strange, who suffered a primary defeat to Roy S. Moore, a conservative firebrand. (Mr. Moore, engulfed in scandal, went on to lose the general election to Doug Jones, a Democrat.)
After Mr. Strange lost the primary, it appeared that Mr. Trump, then early in his first term, deleted some of his social media posts supporting the senator.
Mr. Trump has won in Alabama by at least 25 percentage points in each of the last three presidential elections. But David Mowery, a Republican strategist in Alabama, said voters there tended to live out the state motto, a Latin phrase that translates to “We dare defend our rights” but that some roughly interpret to mean “Don’t tell me what to do.”
“Even when it’s President Trump,” Mr. Mowery said, “sometimes the Alabama electorate is preternaturally against the guy that’s the front-runner, or the guy that they’re supposed to vote for.”
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