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Alabama runoff: Rep. Martha Roby, who criticized Trump in 2016, tries to keep her seat

President Donald Trump is again at the center of a ballot test, as Republican voters in Alabama decide who to send to Congress: an incumbent who refused to vote for him in 2016 or a former Democrat who's become a believer in the gospel of "Make America Great Again."

The incumbent is Rep. Martha Roby, who came to Congress in the 2010 Republican wave but won just 39 percent of the vote in this year's primary. The reason: Roby had condemned Trump in 2016, after the release of a videotape that caught him bragging about sexual assault, and urged him to "step aside and allow a responsible, respectable Republican to lead the ticket."

Both Trump and Roby won that year, but Roby ran 17 points behind the president in her southeast Alabama district. Thousands of conservatives wrote in other names to protest her Trump statement - and thousands remain mobilized against her. This year, Bobby Bright, who held the congressional seat before Roby and lost to her in 2010, joined three other challengers who branded Roby as disloyal to Trump and forced her into Tuesday's runoff.

"The people who voted against her last month believe they've been underrepresented, and they're right," said Al Allenback, Bright's volunteer coordinator.

But now the president has backed Roby, and she and her allies claim that she has seen the light. In a June 22 tweet, Trump wrote that Roby had become "a consistent and reliable vote for our Make America Great Again Agenda." In a robocall that went out to voters this week, Vice President Mike Pence reiterated Trump's support. In TV ads, the national Chamber of Commerce portrayed Roby as a key Trump ally and Bright as a Democratic turncoat.

"Bright voted for Nancy Pelosi's liberal agenda over 70 percent of the time, took $25,000 in campaign contributions from Nancy Pelosi, and even defended Obamacare," a narrator warned in the ads.

Bright, meanwhile, has focused on Roby's 2016 comments and her voting record to argue that she has lost her way. A former mayor of Montgomery who had been one of the House's most conservative Democrats, Bright said he wanted to shut down the special counsel's probe into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. He also argued that Roby provided reliable, unthinking support for spending bills, focusing especially on this year's omnibus package, which the president signed and then condemned.

"It funded Planned Parenthood [and] it funded the Affordable Care Act - things that our congressperson promised years ago that she would not support," Bright told a local public access station last week.

Roby largely ignored Bright's attacks, hammering him on his single term as a Democratic congressman. She ran on the clout she had built across four terms in a Republican majority, from backing work requirements for food-stamp recipients to barring money for Planned Parenthood as part of family planning funds.

"My record is a strong conservative record that I stand by," she told the Associated Press last week after a lunch event with peanut farmers.

Bright has argued that his move into the Republican Party is not a problem for voters - and that Trump's endorsement of Roby doesn't mean she'll win.

"The president's oh and two in Alabama," Bright told BuzzFeed last week, referring to the president's 2017 endorsements of two Republicans who lost Senate races. "I'm gonna make him oh and three."

But the president's latest endorsement in a congressional contest was successful. Last month, after he tweeted his endorsement of Rep. Dan Donovan, R-N.Y., the Staten Island congressman ran 28 points ahead of challenger Michael Grimm, who was hobbled by a criminal conviction.

While the first round of the primary had revealed Roby's weakness, most Republicans now expect her to head off Bright. Alabama Democrats also expected Bright to lose, citing Republican discomfort not just with his term in Congress but with his roots in Montgomery, which is seen in the "wiregrass region" that makes up most of the district as a bastion of crime and liberalism.

Republicans will also pick their nominees in three statewide races. Attorney General Steve Marshall faces a close race with former attorney general Troy King. State legislator Will Ainsworth is seeking the nomination for lieutenant governor, as is Public Service Commission President Twinkle Cavanaugh. State legislator Gerald Dial and small-town mayor Rick Pate are facing off in the race for agriculture commissioner.

The winner of each of those races would be favored to win in November, as would either Roby or Bright. Tabitha Isner, the business analyst who won the Democratic nomination last month, has raised less than $240,000 for her campaign and been left off her party's target lists.

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