Candidates in Alabama’s intensely-watched Senate race made their final pitches to voters late Monday, after President Donald Trump urged loyalists to elect the firebrand Republican Roy Moore despite accusations he molested minors decades ago. The two protagonists in the race, Moore and Democrat Doug Jones, headlined competing rallies where they implored their supporters to march to the polls and vote Tuesday, on perhaps the most closely watched US election day of 2017. “Everyone in this state — and most of the people in this nation — are watching this election,” Moore told a few hundred people at his first public campaign event in six days, as he blasted the outside influence on the race. The election appeared headed to the wire in this conservative bastion and unexpected battleground, where energized Democrats pulled out the stops, recruiting Barack Obama to rally support for the party’s standardbearer. “This one’s serious. You can’t sit it out,” the former president says in a robocall ahead of Tuesday’s special election. “So get out and vote, Alabama.” Trump has put out a call of his own, telling residents that “I need Alabama to go vote for Roy Moore.” Until recently it had been unimaginable for a Republican to lose a statewide election in Alabama, which Trump carried handily and which has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992. But Moore’s candidacy turned toxic for the Republican Party after The Washington Post published an investigative account including accusations by women who claim he sexually molested or pursued them when they were in their teens and he was a state attorney in his thirties. One of the women says she was 14 when Moore molested her. Moore, now 70, denies the allegations. Some in the Republican establishment have sought to distance themselves from Moore. But with Republicans clinging to a razor thin Senate majority, Trump — who himself was infamously caught on tape boasting about groping women — has given Moore his political blessing. The latest survey by Fox News put the Democrat Jones ahead by 10 points, although a new Emerson poll has Moore ahead by nearly that much. Published in Daily Times, December 13th 2017.