AL-Sen: As Roy Moore grows ever-more berserk in his denials that he preyed on teenage girls and his fellow Republicans sink to stunning new depths to defend his indefensible behavior, we can be quite sure that he's not going anywhere—though just wait until next month. Following the Washington Post's shocking story about Moore, the elections website Decision Desk HQ commissioned pollster Opinion Savvy to immediately go into the field with a new survey of the Dec. 12 special election, and the results are eyebrow-raising.
The poll found Moore tied with Democrat Doug Jones at 46 apiece, but even more meaningful than the toplines are the trendlines: Last month, Moore held a 50-45 lead. Now, polls conducted over just a single night are very liable to miss certain voters and need to be treated with caution, though it appears the Moore news was quick to sink in: Opinion Savvy asked respondents whether they'd heard about the allegations and 82 percent said they had. (Another caveat, though, is that the sort of people more likely to respond to a poll tend to be more politically plugged-in.) Still, Moore's slippage is notable.
Opinion Savvy also tested a hypothetical matchup in which Sen. Luther Strange, whom Moore defeated in September's GOP primary, runs as a write-in. In that scenario, Jones would edge Moore 44-41 while Strange garners 12 percent of the vote. In this three-way test, a much smaller proportion of voters say they're undecided or would vote for someone else (3 percent) than in the two-way head-to-head (8 percent), which indicates that undecideds are indeed conservative-leaning, just as you'd expect in Alabama. But by the same token, a portion of Republican voters may belong to the #NeverMoore camp (would they be called ravens? sorry, sorry) and would rather sit this one out if Strange isn't an option—or might even migrate to Jones if the Moore story disgusts them enough. We'll really just have to see how this all develops.
Meanwhile, Moore is finally about to run his first TV ad of the general election. (Remarkably, Jones has had the airwaves to himself this entire time.) The spot features a some fairly frenetic martial music and an equally frenetic narrator who talks about Moore's commitment to our armed forces. For someone like Moore, the ad's partisan message is both odd—you'd think he'd go for something in his Christian conservative wheelhouse—and oddly weak. While there's an obligatory jab at Barack Obama (he "gutted our military and put our security at risk"), Jones could just as easily say he's "proud of Alabama's role supplying our troops" and that he, too, believes in "a safer America and more jobs for Alabama." It's almost as though Moore is trying to shore up a weakness with security-minded voters … and that may not be his only soft spot.