The most closely watched race in Alabama on Tuesday will be the Republican primary runoff for Senate, where Representative Barry Moore and Jared Hudson, a former Navy SEAL, will face off for a second time after no candidate won a majority of the vote in the May 19 primary.
Only three independent surveys have been fielded since the primary, with Mr. Hudson leading in two and Mr. Moore, who had by far the most votes in the primary and was endorsed by President Trump, leading in one.
Mr. Moore was endorsed by Mr. Trump in January, and he had narrow leads in most of the independent polling conducted from March to May. With Mr. Trump reaffirming his support ahead of the primary, Mr. Moore outperformed those polls and won by nearly 14 percentage points.
If Mr. Moore wins on Tuesday, the results could be seen as another indicator of the president’s sway among Republican voters, and would follow a recent pattern for Mr. Trump’s preferred candidates in the state. In both 2020 and 2022, the Trump-backed Senate candidate in Alabama won a plurality of votes in the primary before widening his or her margin in the runoff. And in both of those races, the candidates received a higher vote share than they had in most polling.
Mr. Hudson’s lead in two of the runoff polls, however, could be a sign that he has picked up support from voters who previously backed Steve Marshall, the state’s attorney general. Once a front-runner in the race, Mr. Marshall ended up in third place with nearly 25 percent of the vote — a little more than one percentage point behind Mr. Hudson.
Recent polls indicated a sizable number of voters remained undecided in the weeks leading up to the runoff, including a Strategy Management survey from earlier this month that put the number at 20 percent. But those polls did offer some indications, despite a limited sample size, of where the candidates may find areas of strength.
Mr. Hudson did best among respondents in the Birmingham metro area, including Jefferson County where he narrowly lost a race for sheriff in 2022. Mr. Moore fared better among older voters and ideological conservatives, who tend to make up a higher share of the electorate in lower-turnout runoff elections.
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