TCR Brief: Election Day In Alabama; We Try To Make Sense Of Those Crazy Poll Numbers
Most Show Republican Roy Moore Hanging On To A Slight Lead Over Democrat Doug Jones, But Losing Ground After Regaining Some Last Week
And there are some real outliers. Fox News has the Democrat with a 10 point lead; at the same time the Emerson College poll has Moore leading by 9.
Here’s a roundup from Real Clear Politics:
In a piece entitled: “What The Hell Is Happening With These Alabama Polls?”, Nate Silver at 538.com has a pretty intriguing explanation of the extreme divergence: the Fox News poll is a live caller poll, the Emerson poll is an automated, or “robopoll”. The big difference? “Automated polls are prohibited by law from calling voters on cellphones.” That doesn’t necessarily mean one is more accurate than the other, but polling only people with landlines would tend to skew results older; cellphones would get younger peoples’ input. (In fact, the Fox News poll found Jones leading by 30 points among people reached on their cellphones).
Meanwhile, President Obama dipped his toes into the race, recording a robocall on behalf of Jones. Moore’s got one from Trump. NBA Hall-of-Famer Charles Barkley showed up last night at Jones’ election eve rally. If the Democrat ends up pulling off the upset, it might be because he waited until the last weekend to bring in national Democratic leaders and celebrities (although Joe Biden did campaign for him earlier), and thus accusations he’s in the pocket of the “liberal elite” didn’t really stick.
Moving from qualified acknowledgment that he dated teenage girls when he was a DA in his 30s, to complete denial of the same, Moore’s never been able to move the spotlight off of him. And in the past week or so, he’s been trying to avoid that spotlight by making himself scarce, making few personal appearances and granting few interviews. Believe it or not, one of the few Moore did agree to was with a 12-year old girl interviewer. We are not making this up. It was arranged by people affiliated with Steve Bannon, (to what end we are not sure) and you can watch it here:
The U.S. Senate seat that will either go today to a man accused of groping a 14-year old girl, or a dogged former U.S. Attorney, will be up for grabs again in 2020.
(This story originally appeared in “The Chaos Report” Newsletter. Subscribe at https://thechaosreport.com/subscribe/?scr=Medium)
