Judge Roy Moore’s overwhelming support from evangelical voters could propel him to victory in his runoff election for Alabama’s U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday, Reid Wilson reports in The Hill.
From The Hill:
Polls show Moore leading Sen. Luther Strange (R) in advance of Tuesday’s runoff election for the Republican nomination for Strange’s seat. That lead has held despite millions in spending by Strange’s allies and even President Trump’s endorsement.
If Moore makes it through the runoff, and over Democratic nominee Doug Jones in the December special election, he will owe a debt of political gratitude to an army of evangelicals — and specifically Southern Baptists — who see him as a hero in the culture wars that have shaken social conservatives in recent years.
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Baptists are the most conservative group of any mainstream religious tradition: 60 percent call themselves conservative. They told Pew Research Center pollsters they favored Republicans by a 61 percent to 26 percent margin.
And Alabama has a higher percentage of Baptists than all but one other state, Tennessee: 31 percent of Alabama residents are members of a Baptist faith tradition, according to Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study. Just 23 percent of Oklahoma residents are Baptist.
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