A new poll released this week shows former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville with a big lead heading into the runoff on March 31.
The poll, which sampled 645 likely GOP primary voters from March 6-8, shows Tommy Tuberville at 52% with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions at 40%. The margin of error for the poll was ±3.86%.
The survey was conducted by Cygnal. The polling experts at FiveThirtyEight rate Cygnal’s polls highly for their accuracy and dependability.
The results were gathered using a combination of methods that Cygnal calls a “probabilistic mixed-mode survey,” meaning the responses are from a combination of emails, text messages and calls to landline phones.
The poll also ranked the candidates’ favorability ratings:
- Tuberville has a 62.6% approval rating and 26.1% disapproval
- Sessions has a 55.7% approval rating and 38.3% disapproval
“Jeff Sessions’ unfavorability has continued to increase among GOP Primary voters over the course of the primary season,” said Brent Buchanan, Cygnal’s CEO and founder.
Buchanan believes that if President Donald Trump continues to denigrate his former attorney general then Sessions will not have a good chance to close the gap.
The full results of the survey revealed the preferences among supporters of U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-Fairhope), who finished third in the March 3 primary with about 25% of the total vote.
- Tuberville has 45.1% of Byrne voters.
- Sessions has 37.9% of Byrne voters.
The crosstabs of the poll reveal that Sessions has taken a six-point lead, 47.3 to 41.3, in Alabama’s First Congressional District where Byrne did quite well.
More troublingly for the Sessions campaign, Cygnal’s poll indicates he is losing among the citizens in Alabama’s Second Congressional District. The survey has Tuberville leading there 43.6% to 40.1%.
Sessions won nearly all the counties in AL-02 on March 3. This may indicate that the Byrne voters most likely to switch to Tuberville are those outside of Byrne’s base in Southwest Alabama.
Sessions and Tuberville will face each other again at the ballot box on March 31.
Henry Thornton is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can contact him by email: henry@new-yhn.local or on Twitter @HenryThornton95.
