Big League-Gravis Alabama poll: Jones leads Moore 48% to 44% with 8% undecided
Neil W. McCabe
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Former U.S. attorney G. Douglas Jones, a Democrat, holds a slim lead over his GOP challenger and two-time state chief justice Roy S. Moore with 48 percent to Moore’s 44 percent, according to the Big League-Gravis poll conducted Dec. 1 through Dec. 3 with 1,276 voters likely to vote in Alabama’s Dec. 12 special Senate election.
“With less than two weeks left before the special election, the race is tight and going to pivot on which direction the Luther Strange voters go,” said Doug Kaplan, the managing partner of Gravis Marketing, the Florida-based company that executed the poll. The poll carries a 2.7 percent margin of error.
Sen. Luther J. Strange III (R.-Ala.) lost the Sept. 26 primary runoff to Moore with Strange securing 218,066 votes to Moore’s 262,204 votes.
“Who are the voters, who are going to vote against Moore twice?” Kaplan asked.
In the Aug. 15 Democratic primary, Jones secured 109,105 votes of the 165,006 votes cast, if all the Democrats vote for Jones, Moore needs to hold on to 97,199 Strange voters, or 45 percent of the Strange voters, if the turnout in this off-cycle winter election matches the turnout from the August contest for the Democrats and the September contest for the Republicans.
In the Nov. 14 Big League-Gravis poll, 64 percent of the Republicans who voted for Strange, roughly 140,000, said they would support Moore two days after the article in The Washington Post and 22 percent said they would vote for Jones.
Kaplan said Jones is getting 93 percent of Democrats, while Moore only gets 76 percent of Republicans.
“Jones is also winning with self-identified Independents by more than 25 percent,” he said.
“This is third of four polls we are conducting in Alabama and another key is the undecided vote,” he said.
“When we saw the shift for Jones in the last poll, there was a movement of voters saying they were undecided, instead of coming out for Jones,” he said.
“In this poll, either Jones is winning in the poll or people are being dishonest, because they don’t want to admit that they are actually voting for Moore.”
The special election campaign to fill the Senate seat vacated by the Jefferson B. “Jeff” Sessions becoming President Donald J. Trump‘s attorney was shaken up by an article in The Washington Post, which shared accounts by four women, who claimed to have had sexually awkward relationships with Moore in their teens, while he was in his early 30s. One of the four women claimed that her encounter with Moore occurred when she was 14-years-old.
Forty-two percent of the respondents said they believe the accusations against Moore, but 34 percent said they do not and 24 percent said they were undecided.
Ninety-four percent of the poll participants said they had read about or heard about the accusations.
Moore is the choice of 48 percent of men and 39 percent of women, he said.
Jones is the choice of 46 percent of men and 51 percent of women, he said.
In the Nov. 14 Big League-Gravis poll Jones took a 47 percent to 42 percent lead over Moore, Kaplan said.
Forty-eight percent of the participants were Republicans, 33 percent were Democrats and 19 percent were Independents.
The survey was conducted using interactive voice responses and online panel cell phone users and the results were weighted to match a proprietary voter model.
Check out the crosstabs for the poll here:
Crosstabs for Dec. 1 through Dec. 3 Big League-Gravis Alabama Poll
Former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. is one of the only national Democrats cleared to campaign for G. Douglas Jones. (Photo courtesy of Jones Facebook)
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