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By DAVID ESPO AP Special Correspondent

WASHINGTON (AP) - The primary season just ended and the general election campaign now unfolding looks the same to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, tea party favorite, foe of immigration legislation and the only Republican senator running in 2014 without a ballot opponent of any stripe.

"Jeff Sessions is probably held in higher esteem than the Alabama football coach and the Auburn football coach put together," says Rep. Mo Brooks, a tea party-backed congressman from the football-mad state.

Sessions has no shortage of detractors, and his good political fortune is a blend of luck and design. It's also one he declines to analyze in any depth as he waits to see if Republicans win a majority this fall and he becomes head of the Senate Budget Committee and leader of an attack on federal deficits.

If so, he said in a recent interview, he will produce a Republican consensus document that balances the budget at least by the end of its 10-year time frame, rather than his own, possibly more conservative, personal blueprint.

Sessions' lack of opposition this fall in a state with a heavy African-American presence stems from a Democratic party weakness so pervasive that it holds none of the statewide offices, only one seat in the nine-member congressional delegation and a minority in both houses of the legislature.

His free ride in the primary was different, though. It resulted from a courtship of the tea party that allowed him to escape the type of primary challenge that dogged GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, bedeviled Sen. Pat Roberts in Kansas and nearly toppled Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi.

"I believe the tea party is right on every major issue," Sessions said in an interview. "I say that. They know I believe that ... Taxing more, regulating more, blocking American energy more, bigger government and more welfare is not going to make America a better nation."

Since he ran six autumns ago, Sessions has voted against the federal bailout that President George W. Bush said was needed to prevent an economic collapse, as well as President Barack Obama's economic stimulus and health care law. He opposed numerous increases in the debt limit and a major bill to re-regulate Wall Street after the worst crash in decades. He also aided Sen. Ted Cruz' 2013 overnight filibuster aimed at dramatizing opposition to continued federal funding of the health care law, one of the political highlights of a tea party-backed partial government shutdown.

Sessions says his voting record is designed to represent those in his low-income state who feel ignored by government, rather than to protect big economic entities. Alabama had the ninth-lowest median family income among states in the most recent Census Bureau report on the subject, $43,464 for 2012.

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Sessions unopposed in primary or general election - Quincy Herald-Whig | Illinois & Missouri News, Sports