New Alabama Senate poll shows Moore up 15, and our forecast barely moves

A survey from yes. every kid. foundation., fielded July 8-11 among 601 likely voters, puts Republican Barry Moore at 47 percent and Democrat Everett Wess at 32 percent in Alabama's open Senate race.

The poll changed almost nothing in our forecast. Our model now gives Moore a 100 in 100 chance, with a mean margin of R+22.8 and a 5th-to-95th percentile range running from R+33.3 to R+12.3. The previous run, from earlier the same afternoon, had the mean margin at R+22.7 and the range at R+33.3 to R+12.0. Wess's chance was zero percent then and is zero percent now.

The 15-point margin in the poll is narrower than our mean estimate, but it sits inside the range our simulations already allow. Roughly a fifth of respondents picked neither candidate, which is one reason a single survey of this size does little to move a forecast that is already at the edge of its scale.

Nationally, our average of 28 generic-ballot polls over the past 45 days stands at D+6.5. Our model gives Democrats a 49 percent chance of Senate control and Republicans 50 percent, with a mean of 50.2 Democratic seats; Democrats need 51 seats for control and Republicans 50, because the vice president is a Republican and a 50-50 tie goes to the Republicans. In the House, our model gives Democrats a 93 percent chance of a majority, with a mean of 240.1 seats against the 218 needed. That House figure carries a caveat of our own making: our simulation correlates error nationally, by census division, by state and within each district, but we have no cluster data to correlate demographically similar districts across the map, so the control probability is marginally firmer than a fuller model would show.