The Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama, Roy Moore, leads Democrat Doug Jones by only six points among decided voters, 50.2 to 44.5, according to a poll released today by Decision Desk HQ. The two are neck and neck among those who say they are considering voting in the election, with Moore leading by only half a point.
Since before 2000, Alabama voters have decisively chosen the Republican candidates, U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions and current senior senator Richard Shelby, by more than 20 points. In Sessions’s last election, 2014, he ran opposed (and still recorded his second-highest vote total). Given the polling data and the controversy surrounding Moore, the state supreme court’s former chief justice, the 2017 special election promises to be the state’s closest in almost 20 years.
DDHQ also polled candidates about President Donald Trump’s job performance rating, finding that 35 percent of those polled strongly disapprove, while only 38 percent approve. Forty-one percent said they oppose efforts to remove Confederate statues from the state, against 20 percent supportive, and 31 percent said they are supportive of the NFL National Anthem protests, against 44 opposed.
In its last poll of the Alabama Senate race, where it measured support for Moore and incumbent Luther Strange in the GOP primary, Decision Desk found that Moore led Strange by 18 points. He went on to defeat Strange by nine in the election.