If you had told me last year that there was going to be a competitive Senate election in Alabama before 2017 was over, I would have probably smiled politely and slowly backed away. The idea of a close Senate race in the Yellowhammer state should be absurd. Trump won the state by 28 points, indicating that it should reliably send Republicans to the upper chamber despite the national environment strongly favoring Democrats.
But the GOP nominated Roy Moore—a candidate who underperformed national Republicans even before the Washington Post and other outlets discovered that he had improper relationships with teenage girls while he was a man in his 30s.
As of Sunday, according to the RealClear Politics average, Democratic candidate Doug Jones leads Moore by less than a percentage point. This race is moving fast and will likely stay at the center of elections news in the coming weeks. So it’s worth asking: What do (and what don’t) we know about the state of the race right now?
It seems that Moore’s lead in the polls dropped after the Post published its initial story on November 9. This graphic shows Moore’s polling average before and after that day.
The break here is clear—Moore had a solid single-digit lead until the story about his relationships with teenage girls broke. It’s also possible to argue that Moore has lost even more ground than the chart shows: The average of the first three polls taken after the Post story have Moore up by 2 points, and the average of the following three have him down by 2.3 points.
This makes sense—it often takes time for a story to unfold and for voters to process the details. For instance, others have pointed out that Todd Akin, the Republican Senatorial candidate in Missouri in 2012, slid in the polls after his comments about “legitimate rape.” It’s not hard to see that pattern when you look at the Huffington Post Pollster aggregate for that race.
Obviously every race is different. Very conservative, evangelical Alabamians might provide Moore with a floor that Akin lacked (he was still trending downward on Election Day in 2012). And it’s possible that other stories will emerge before the end of the election (remember that Trump’s lewd remarks about women in the Access Hollywood tapes didn’t dominate the final stretch of the 2016 campaign). But the Post story is big news, so it’s worth pointing out that there’s precedent for scandals stretching for weeks beyond when they initially break.
It’s also worth noting that the topline findings of these polls indicate that Jones has gained over the past two weeks. In polls before the scandal broke, Jones had about 40 percent of the vote on average while Moore had roughly 48 percent. When averaged together, post-scandal polls show Moore with 46.3 percent of the vote and Jones with 46.5 percent. That’s represents a notable downward shift in Moore’s aggregate support and a big jump for Jones.
That being said, there’s still a lot of missing information.
We don’t know what the composition of the electorate will be. That might sound like the sort of dry polling analysis that only a few dozen people on Twitter care about. But it’s actually very important to understanding this race.
As others have documented, polls that show a higher approval rating for Trump also show Moore performing better. Moreover, the range of these polls is wide. The Fox News poll has Trump’s net approval at +5 points in Alabama and an Emerson poll has Trump at a +22 point net approval in the state.
That’s a real gap. To put it in more familiar terms: Trump recently registered a +6.6 point net approval rating among registered voters in Texas in September. Texas is a medium-red state that’s constantly (and typically unsuccessfully) targeted by Democrats. And while they’re very different states demographically, it’s possible to picture an Alabama special election electorate where some Democrats are energized, many Republicans don’t show up and Trump’s approval rating among the group of people who actually vote is in that same neighborhood. The Emerson poll on the other hand, puts Trump’s net approval at +22 points. That’s closer to where all Alabama registered voters were in September according to Morning Consult.
I don’t know which electorate is going to turn out in December—that’s a moving part that’ll be important to track as this race unfolds.
Obviously, there’s also the caveat that polls can’t predict events. Polling won’t show us whether a notable Republican will run a write-in campaign or if more women will come forward. Surveys are a snapshot of public opinion, not a window into the future.
And finally (and maybe most obviously) we don’t know what the result of the race is going to be. But unless public opinion moves dramatically, it’ll be hard to see the result as anything other than a rebuke of Roy Moore.
