Big League-Gravis Alabama poll: Sen. Luther Strange’s voters wary of Judge Moore after accusations
Neil W. McCabe
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Alabama Republicans who voted for Sen. Luther J. Strange III in the Sept. 26 Senate primary runoff with Roy S. Moore are not committed to Moore as he struggles against charges of sexual misconduct as he campaigns for the Dec. 12 special election to fill the unexpired term of Attorney General Jefferson B. “Jeff” Sessions, according to the Big League-Gravis poll conducted Nov. 10 with 478 likely Alabama voters.
“Moore is in serious trouble with Strange supporters,” said Doug Kaplan, the managing partner of Gravis Marketing, the Florida-based company that executed the poll. The entire poll carries a 4.5 percent margin of error and a larger margin of error inside special demographics.
“Republicans who voted for Strange are the wild card,” he said. “Thirty-four percent of Moore’s supporters believe the women accusing him of pursuing them when they were teenagers with really weird stuff claimed by the woman, who was only 14.”
Kaplan said only 15 percent of Strange supporters believe the women accusing Moore, but 47 percent of them say they are undecided about who is telling the truth. “That’s roughly 102,000 voters in play.”
Twenty-eight percent of Strange voters have a Very Unfavorable opinion of Moore and 14 percent have a Somewhat Unfavorable, he said. “Only 15 percent of Strange voters have a Very Favorable view of Moore and 31 percent have a Somewhat Favorable view.”
In the Aug. 15 GOP Senate primary, Moore and Strange were the top vote-getters, but neither man garnered at least 50 percent of the vote. Moore collected 138,971 votes with 33 percent compared to Moore’s 164,524 votes with 39 percent of the vote. The total vote in that primary for the Republicans was 423,282 votes.
In the Sept. 26 primary runoff, Moore won over Strange, 55 percent to 45 percent, with 480,270 total votes–a 13 percent increase over rthe Aug. 15 GOP turnout.
In the Aug. 15 Democratic Senate primary, G. Douglas Jones won his party’s nomination beat out eight other Democrats with 109,105 of 165,006 votes cast or 66 percent of the vote.
Head-to-head between Jones and Moore, if Moore holds on to the 262,204 votes he collected in the Sept. 26 runoff and Jones held his votes from Aug. 15, Moore would win by 97,198 votes–a margin equal to 45 percent of Strange’s 218,066 votes in the runoff.
In the 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.
One way of putting the 2017 contests in perspective, GOP nominee Donald J. Trump won Alabama’s nine electoral votes with 1,318,235 votes, 62 percent, compared to 729,547 votes, 34 percent, for his Democratic rival Hillary R. Clinton.
Another way of looking at how different this political season is for Alabama is to look at the 2014 election, when Sessions ran unopposed garnering 97 percent of the vote.
The survey was conducted using interactive voice responses and an online panel of cell phones users. The results are weighted to match a proprietary voter turnout model.
Spreadsheet of crosstabs for Luther supporters in Nov. 10 Big League-Gravis Alabama poll
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