MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The Center for Politics on Thursday shifted its rating for the Alabama governor’s race from solid Republican to likely Republican.
The move comes after two polls, including one commissioned by Alabama Daily News and Gray Television, show Republican nominee Tommy Tuberville leading Democrat Doug Jones by just over 10 points, the center said in a press release.
Though they have Tuberville up with a double-digit lead, the polls imply the race is much closer than 2022’s contest between Gov. Kay Ivey and Democratic nominee Yolanda Flowers. Ivey earned nearly 70% of the vote to Flowers’ 29%.
In ADN/Gray TV’s survey of 500 likely general election voters, 51.2% said they would vote for Tuberville, Alabama’s senior U.S. senator, if the election were today, while 40% said they would vote for Jones, the former U.S. senator. The remaining 8.9% said they were undecided.
The survey was conducted statewide on Oct. 16 and 17 and has a margin of error of ±4.38%.
The Center in its rating linked to a Substack article by Ethan Chen arguing that “in a midterm where cost of living the top issue, the South, as a relatively poor region, may offer some particular upside for Democrats, even if the partisanship of states like Alabama ends up being too much to overcome.”
It also recognizes the history between the candidates, as the gubernatorial contest is a rematch of the 2020 Senate race that first sent Tuberville to Washington.
“In 2020, Tuberville unseated Jones by a 60%-40% vote—in a gubernatorial race that may be somewhat less polarized, we’re watching to see how much closer this year’s matchup between those two candidates is,” the Center for Politics wrote in its dispatch.
Jones has been critical of the new polling on the campaign trail this week.
Answering a reporter’s question about a poll showing Tuberville with a nine-point lead, Jones said at an event in Dothan Thursday afternoon that polls intentionally favor Republican voters. He did not specify which polls he was talking about.
“The last polls you saw is probably a Republican hack poll that is out there to try to drive down Democratic votes and try to drive up Republican votes,” Jones said. “That is not polling. I don’t really see the polling these days, except I know what you see is not the numbers that are out there. You saw this crowd today. We’re seeing that. Compare that to what Tommy Tuberville’s getting across the board. There is no excitement because he’s not qualified to be governor of the state of Alabama.”
The New York Times, which aggregates polls on its site, included both the ADN/Gray TV poll and the Alabama Poll released Monday. It listed the ADN/Gray TV poll conducted by Cygnal as a “select pollster” because it met certain criteria about a track record of accuracy, membership in a professional polling organization and probability-based sampling.
The general election is Nov. 3.