Jones has a chance to win, but he's the underdog

any more. Period.

It sounds like a 'fix' is in.

that's for sure.

They are trying to do what they did in part to hillary. Make it seem like a safe win so people won't feel like their vote is needed and they can stay away or make a protest vote.

Keep up the pressure. Make sure nobody believes it's over before they vote. Moore's supporters certainly won't.

A ten point spread for the opponent would not have the desired effect of bring their voters to the polls. More likely, they would give up and stay home

I suspect they believe their voters are motivated enough to show up, make a statement. The main purpose would be to suppress the opposition turnout.

Now they are trashed because they are pro-Democratic. Not everything in life is a conspiracy...

Their polling outfit appears to be separate from the ridiculous new division.

"Moore might prevail if only the people who typically vote in Alabama elections turn out Tuesday, which is often what happens in special elections,” says Democratic pollster Chris Anderson, who conducts the Fox News Poll with Republican counterpart Daron Shaw.

“But this appears to be a special, special election with blacks and young voters animated by a caustic Republican candidate and the chance of winning a statewide election with national implications, and at the same time some Republicans and many moderates are turned off by Moore, too.”

A subtle but potentially noteworthy finding is Alabama voters who were interviewed on cellphones are +30 for Jones, while the race is roughly even among all others. The fact that traditional, high-quality probability samples, like the Fox News Poll, include both landline and cellphone numbers may be why these polls show Jones doing relatively well compared to automated to blended polls."

there is better turnout of young people and African Americans than usually happens. I HOPE that that model is correct. He also is hypothesizing that the Republicans will have lower turnout than normal. Note that Trump had similar problems in 2016 and in many areas, his voters (which may be like Moore voters) were out in enough force that they won.

I hope that this forecast is what happens, but do you really have a metric that defines this poll to be better than the others? Do you know the other polls do not include cell phones, which has been common for a reasonably long time.

The thing I heard (I think here but maybe VPR) is that there is a huge GOTV effort in the African American community - including the churches.

This is a GOTV effort. Fox wants to encourage Republicans inclined to stay home to go to the polls, while suppressing Democratic voters. No poll is trustworthy these days, and especially not one offered by Fox News.

Nothing more. Interesting how the only poll that shows Jones ahead is a Fox News poll.

Fox hopes to suppress Democrats from voting.

They want to put a scare into Moor's base.

Folks may have changed their minds as they see Roy hide like a rat for the past 10 days from the media and keeps changing his stories.
The Franken Effect?

They like did against Don Siegelman in '02.

I’m wondering if there might be an agenda behind these numbers. My bs detector is going off.

1. Get out the RW vote;

1. Be Able to say that Democratic pushback was overstated, that Trump's endorsement turned things around once Moore wins.

Be able to say that the Librul Media were lying about Jones' chances to try and put down conservatives (even though they were publishing garbage polls themselves)

They know how to play the knuckle draggers that watch FOX. What they want is a landslide victory for perversion,slavery and hate and make those the Republican norm for winning future elections.

The bullshit that's pulled by Faux News, Breitbart and others is speeding the downfall of this country.

I'm not buying that poll for a second...........

Looks like just a legitimate difference of opinion about a story many of us are paying attention to.

Get enough Repubs to stay home, have a heavy a heavy African American turn out (if they are
allowed to vote or have their vote counted), and if just enough women who have been sexually
vote for Jones he has a chance.

BTW I still expect Moore to win .... electronic voting machines.

BTW part 2 .... a Fox News poll =

How African Americans can stay home and NOT vote for Jones is beyond my understanding of human nature.

.... keeping their votes from being counted.

Also the heavy grinding poverty of the A.A. community in Alabama might very well
keep many people from voting too.

ALABAMA HAS THE WORST POVERTY IN THE DEVELOPED WORLD, U.N. OFFICIAL SAYS

http://www.newsweek.com/alabama-un-poverty-environmental-racism-743601

Had a poll with Moore up by about 9.

Maybe Fox has Jones ahead to get out the Moore vote?

easy win for Jones, IF he wins

This is the poll they were discussing:

Emerson College Poll: Moore with Significant 9-point Lead in Final Poll.

Roy-Boy the 21st century slavery advocate will have control over WHO counts the votes. If he's declared the winner, the GOP will officially be the party that wants to bring back slavery and the prohibition of both blacks and women to vote. It will be the pathway for the US to officially embrace social fascism. We're already a fascist nation from an economic perspective. A takeover by the ultra-right assures authoritarian rule.

Alabama is thinly and inconsistently polled in general, and trying to determine the credibility of any given poll is very dicey.

My exact thought when I saw that Fox was showing Doug Jones leading....

Don't believe it for a minute.

Great news if true. But it is Fox News.

Jones did win, that would be a MAJOR defeat for not only trump, but the republican agenda.

It would be interesting to see if this would cause the tax plan to be modified to a less draconian reconciliation

I will feel at ease after Jones is sworn in. We are dealing with repubs at several levels so nothing is safe.

Even before the child sexual assault accusations against Moore, how did he get into a position to run for Senate? Did he run on his record? The record of being such a bad judge he was fired TWICE for contravening the Constitution?

It boggles the mind what the Republicans will put ahead of principle and humanity over and over and over. He's such a nakedly bad candidate and he still has massive support because Jeeeeezus!

In addition to everything else, pedo moore SCAMMED some "morals" charity for 100s of thousands of dollars. He's a grifter con man. Even if the phony xtians can "excuse" molesting young girls as "biblical", there is no justification AFAIK for being a grifter. I wonder why this story doesn't get more coverage.

Completely unworthy of holding elected office.

The Alabama GOP wanted to be confident that whoever got the nod to replace Sessions in the Senate would still be a sure-thing for the rightwing votes, like Jeffy-boy was. It looks lilke Sessions handpicked his replacement, but of course the voters (a-hem) get the final say. That's what is supposedly happening now, letting the voters decide.

It's all about the old-boy network in Alabama, and they completely ignored the public relations nightmare of Moore's pedophilia charges. Maybe they didn't even know about it until last month, it's hard to say. The Democratic Party in AL doesn't have much of a budget, and if it weren't for the outside money pouring in to support Jones, he probably wouldn't have had a chance.

Family values, and all that....

I can create polls, too—to get voter apathy.

which shocked America!

"Code Blue, baby! Clear!"

... which can't be hacked and they'd have a paper trail for a recount if needed.

Nobody's taking any chances in Alabama, the hacked voting machines will be used, and they're already rigged.

I'm carrying 4 Doug Jones voters to the polls tomorrow. I'll look for "hackers" for you!

Is this in every county? If so, maybe Doug Jones does have a chance.
I truly hope so.

There are a handful of other races in some localities, but that sample ballot is the one most of us will see Dec. 12th.

http://sos.alabama.gov/alabama-votes/voter/2017-sample-ballots

It's sure to make a difference.

Our biggest issue in PA is gerrymandering, but that's going to take a little more work. Paper ballots can be done immediately. Good luck to you and the good people of Alabama tomorrow!

Please stop being so gullible.

They are trying to get us to be complacent and not go out and vote. They are also trying to motivate Moore voters to vote.

Don't buy it.

Jones wins this in a close one and you can take that to the bank. I knew the gig was over after Trump supportered his primary opponent, asked him to leave the race, then reluctantly half assed endorsed him and after all of that, the moron and his supporters claim his election is a referendum for Trump's presidency.

This is a killer to the "anti" Washington, anti McConnell crowd who pushed him over during the primaries. Add this to the growing African American supporter for Jones and the anti pedo groups growing. He could have rode the anti Washington crowd alone but he decided to play it both way.

This and all the other crazy quotes from him and other controversies is why he would lose come election night.

Its a coin flip that is stacked against Moore. Bookmark this page.

at a recent Presidential election. Never trust a poll, only leads to heartbreak - trust in the stupidity of people who vote.

When they need to vote and send a message that Moore is unacceptable.

I can say that if somehow Moore lost, I think it would be much more impactful on the national conversation than the victories in last month's elections. I certainly don't think the "conventional wisdom" is that Moore will lose. I do wonder how the polling methodologies might result is such differences.

A lot depends on how many Jones voters will be allowed to vote.
Alabama still has voter ID laws that prevent many people of color from voting.

If there is any justice/morality in Alabama, Jones will beat Moore badly. Even Senator Shelby said he couldn't vote for Moore.

There are just not enough Democratic voters in that state to tip the scale - even with high turnout. And, Republicans will support Moore no matter what.

I've seen a number of ads and watched three Doug Jones speeches from beginning to end, and Jones is such a charming and decent fellow that I can't imagine anyone voting Moore over jones.

Every one of Moore's speeches are rambling, incoherent strings of bigotry, stupidity and liberal-bashing with no evidence of critical thinking or vision. Yet, this motherfucker will win.

America is toast. What we need to think about is not saving and fixing all of America, but prepping for a new type of post-Trump America where we create enclaves of goodness and abandon those areas controlled by conservatives. What is inevitable is a condition of hyper-states rights where states - or whole regions of America - will become semi-autonomous, self-governing districts much like Scotland and Northern Ireland are. The idea of "United" states is gone. Forever. We should get used to that new reality and start the new trajectory right now.

they are fucking liars

C'mon people, don't be suckered by this BS, GOTV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This will possibly be a turn out event. The more certain Republicans are in their view that this is a seat they are extremely unlikely to win, the less they will be able to get people out. Complacency on their part is better.

Yet, I suspect that even with this outlier of a poll, they are as unlikely to believe a Democrat could win as Massachusetts voters were to believe that a Republican could take one of their Senate seats - both held by Democrats since Ed Brooke was Senator. Yet, the polling there was much more favorable for Brown -- even as Presidents Obama and Clinton campaigned - even Senator Kerry, only a week after hip surgery, seemed to make more appearances than the candidate!

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2010/senate/ma/massachusetts_senate_special_election-1144.html

I suspect the polling for the Alabama race is a tricky mess as you likely have people unwilling to say out loud that they are going to vote for a Republican who likely abused a 14 year old or a Democrat, who genuinely seems to be a nice guy.

How many dem voters stayed home because of them I wonder?

What I said is that polling on this is likely to be tricky because - for BOTH candidates - there are people who would not openly proudly say who they will vote for.

My background is having worked for 25 years doing statistics, operation research and mathematical modeling for AT&T, mostly in Bell Labs. I even had a turn at teaching a sampling lecture developed by the experts in the group I was then in. I never did polling or opinion research, but I did attend conferences where they were discussed. While many samples designed in our group were intricate and had complicated variance estimates, the things we were estimating were based on measurable qualities - that could always be measured for the sample chosen.

Polling has become progressively harder to do. Gone are the days where you could simply take a random sample of registered voters and actually get a large percent of them to answer. When the "non response rate" was low, the assumption that the non responders were similar to the responders in their demographic cell was a necessary and reasonable assumption that had to be made. As the people willing to even answer the phone plummets, it is harder to justify that assumption.

In addition, the pollsters cannot just put out an estimate based on registered voters, they need a model of likely voters. It is probably the model of likely voters that creates the biggest difference between the various polls. Estimating which voters are more likely to vote is as much an art as a science. Where the sampling portion is scientific - even if there are caveats due to non response, the likely voter models are more heuristic. The first hint of how well the likely voter models worked will come tomorrow when reports come in that show how many people are voting in various places.

Here, the Fox poll is an outlier compared to most other polls. It can be that it is one that got it right, while many were extremely off.

Please do not think that because of this I do not look at the polls -- I do. However, even though statisticians have not gotten worse - they actually are likely better with a wealth of specialized software that makes their job easier - there have been far more surprises in both directions. Consider that no one predicted the big margin in the Virginia race and the massive turnover in their legislature.

Morning Consults "panel".

One theory is that Fox is publicizing a big lead for Jones so that, if and when Moore wins, they can cite Trump's intervention as the deciding fact. And even if Jones squeaks out a victory, it won't be by the margin that Fox is touting, so they can still say that Trump's intervention made it closer than it would have otherwise been.

Basically, it boils down to what assumptions you make.

Read it here:https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-the-hell-is-happening-with-these-alabama-polls/