HUNTSVILLE, Ala. You wanna see some Alabama politics, man? a local chiropractor asks. Ill show you Alabama politics.

Its around midnight at a smoky bar surrounded by gun shops and a stretch of highway outside downtown. Ive been speaking with the chiropractor, and the subject has turned to Alabama politics, which is in the national spotlight as of late due mostly to the Senate candidacy of Judge Roy Moore, an honest-to-God theocrat who is a good bet to win Attorney General Jeff Sessions old seat on Dec. 12.

The chiropractor would prefer not to talk politics. He didnt vote in this years primary only 20 percent of eligible voters did because why would he? Alabama is most assuredly going to vote Republican, he says, and the only Republicans voters got to choose from were a couple of nutjobs.

The man advises me not even to mention that Im a reporter for HuffPost, lest I get my ass kicked. Hes friendly about it, at least, and now he wants to demonstrate for me the alpha and omega of Alabama politics.

He gets up from the bar, ambles over to the open front door and puts his hands around his mouth in the shape of a cone.

ROLL TIDE! he yells.

Two men at the bar look up, jostled out of their thousand-yard stares by the Crimson Tide rallying cry. ROLL TIDE! one hollers.

More shouts, lower now, can be heard coming from outside the bar. Roll tide!

The man sits back down triumphantly. Thats fuckin Alabama politics for you.

The \_()_/ Election

Its hard to pinpoint when or why Republicans decided to overlook Roy Moores ongoing scandals.

He was drummed out of Alabamas Supreme Court in 2003 after hed refused to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments thatd hed put up at the courthouse. Ten years later, he won an election to serve as chief justice, only to be suspended in 2016 for refusing to comply with a federal ruling that legalized same-sex marriage across the nation.

Today, Moore bombshells are still dropping. Its been revealed that he collected a huge salary from his charity, which then failed to report that income to the IRS . Then it was reported that Moore previously took donations from a Nazi group . Some Alabama conservatives are finding it hard to fall in line with their own party on the state level.

Hes more of a demagogue than a politician, said James Lomax, 26, a self-described millennial Republican perhaps best known for his Huntsville City Council run at the age of 18 .

He puts us Republicans in a difficult place where we gotta hold our nose once again to vote for a candidate that we dont believe has the capability to get things done in Washington.

But as with Donald Trump, Republicans will vote for the Republican anyway. Lomax may have his qualms about Moore, but not so many that they prevented him from attending a gala for the candidate. I met Lomax on Oct. 12, at an event for Moore titled Freedom Gala: A Celebration of Freedom. The night was supposed to rally support for Moores increasingly turbulent Senate run, but it started with a series of missteps, and the apathy Lomax described seemed to hang over the room like a weather pattern.

First, Moore salivated over the president despite not being Trumps first pick for Senate and was met with uproarious laughter.

I remember November 2016, after the election of Donald Trump, I felt a great burden I dont know if anybody else felt that, raise your hand if you felt that a great weight taken off of me, he said to a now-guffawing crowd. He was being serious; the audience seemed to think he was joking.

Then, during a memorial for Republican state Rep. Jim Patterson, whod died unexpectedly 10 days prior, Moore couldnt put his finger on the congressmans name. Pattersons widow was in the audience.

My heart goes out to Mrs. Peterson, Moore said.

But he quickly shifted to the platform that got him through the primary in the first place: God and country. Riffing off I Can Only Imagine, the song that played during a memorial slideshow for Patterson, Moore said: We can only imagine how great heaven would be. We could only imagine how great our country would be, if wed only go back to the things that made us great.

What would make us great, he offered, is an understanding of the Constitution and its relationship with God. It wasnt surprising that he barely touched on policy during his speech Moore expresses few discernible policy preferences beyond echoing Trumps views on immigration and citing his own extreme Christian values.

There was a great sucking hole at the center of the evening, however, down which all the gaffes and solecisms fell. Nobody seemed to care about the candidate; several Republicans in attendance said they downright hated the guy. This impression was borne out in various locations across Alabama over the following week. From Republicans who paid to attend Moores gala to conservative Christians at a Montgomery church service, nobody seemed terribly excited by the prospect of him taking office.

Three people at the gala, who didnt want to reveal their names because they work in local politics, said they voted for Moore in the primary because hed be ineffectual as a legislator and therefore become a free, quiet vote for Republicans in D.C.

Others characterized Moore as a hypocrite who portrays himself as a constitutional conservative despite being removed as a judge twice for his eccentric interpretations of the law.