"Want more Moore?" Alabama voters have said, "No" more than they have "Yes".

Roy Moore's Tiger Beat cover audition, 1982 (The Anniston Star)

These days the claims fly thick and fast that Roy Moore couldn't possibly have been a hebephile in his carefree bachelor days of forty years ago because he has been in the public eye since the earth cooled and it woulda come out by now. The *resident's legislative director- who has mucho time on his hands- went on Meet the Press Sunday last to declaim,

“The people in Alabama know Roy Moore better than we do in D.C. We have to be very cautious of allegations that are 40 years old that arise a month before Election Day.”

The fact is, Roy Moore isn't really that popular in Alabama. He has a rump of jackasses who revere him as if in a religious cult, and often as not that hasn't been enough to win him the many offices he has sought.

Southerners have a supine streak, their quarrelsomeness notwithstanding, and dislike hard choices. In the political arena, the trick to shimmying up the greasy pole is winning the right party's nomination in one-party states. Roy Moore has run as a Democrat, and he has run as a Republican, and he has even flirted with running on a third party ticket. His theocratic visions are non-partisan.

Moore made his first bid for office in 1982 when he was 35 and was five years out of law school. After a stint as a prosecutor- spending much of his time trolling the Gadsden Mall and the courthouse halls outside child custody hearings- he ran for Etowah County judge, accusing the sitting judges of corruption. He couldn't prove a damn thing, and lost the Democratic primary "overwhelmingly."

Moore left the country for a year and licked his wounds in Australia, a lacuna in his record no one has yet plumbed (did they have malls there then?).

He returned to Gadsden in 1985, and a year later ran for District Attorney. He lost that race in the Democratic primary.

Washed up and wildly unpopular, he managed to wangle an appointment to the county bench when a sitting judge died in 1992. He set up the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and launched his great experiment in theocratic jurisprudence. The locals loved it, and he won a full six-year term in 1994.

Moore's 62% winning total is the best he has ever done running for office, and that was 35 years ago.

As the end of his term approached, Moore heard the siren call of the American Family Association. Despite protests he was broke, he ran for chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, promising to return "God to our public life and restore the moral foundation of our law." His campaign, centered on religious issues, arguing that Christianity's declining influence "corresponded directly with school violence, homosexuality, and crime."

By then a Republican, Moore won the four-way primary and skated to election with 60% of the vote, riding the tide of state constitutional amendment ballots to legalize interracial marriage but bar same-sex marriage. Bible-thumping rarely goes amiss even as it inevitably ends in gutter-wallowing.

He got himself removed from office for refusing to obey a federal court order and announced a 2004 exploratory committee to run for president on the Constitution Party line.

That went nowhere.

In 2006 Moore challenged the Republican governor of Alabama and got 33% of the primary vote.

In 2010 Moore ran for governor again. That time he dropped to 19% of the vote, coming in fourth.

In 2001 Moore formed an exploratory committee to run for president as a Republican. That went nowhere and he slunk back to the food court at Gadsden Mall.

In 2012 Moore ran for Chief Justice again. He got 49.9% of the primary vote and squeaked back into office with only 51.7% of the general election vote. He got 150,000 fewer votes than his party's presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, and was 9% behind the margin by which voters defeated a constitutional amendment to remove references to segregated schooling and poll taxes.

In 2016 Moore was suspended, without pay, until his term as chief justice expired in 2019 after he instructed state judges to defy the US Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision. Since he would have been age-barred to seek another term, he jumped at the chance for a place in the world's best retirement home, the US Senate.

In the 2017 Republican Senate primary, Moore got 38.9% of the vote. In the runoff, he got 262,000 votes:  54.6% on a 14% voter turnout- down from 18% in the first vote.

The latest poll shows Moore with 49% support for the December 12 election. The only question is who is more motivated: those who prefer a child molester to a Democrat, or the other way around?