Poll: Moore up 17 points in Alabama Senate race

Republican Roy Moore leads his Democratic opponent in the Alabama Senate race by 17 points, according to a new poll.

Moore takes 56 percent of the vote, while Democrat Doug Jones takes 39 percent, according to a survey commissioned by the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), which has ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and conducted by Axis Research.

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More than half of voters in Alabama are backing Moore, a former state supreme court justice, the poll noted. The survey also said Alabamians care most about transforming Washington, D.C. and moral values.

The results of the survey come a little more than one month before the special election to fill the seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Moore, who lead an insurgent campaign to defeat Sen. Luther Strange (R-Ala.) in September, has the backing of former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon. Bannon has vowed to challenge the Republican establishment in the 2018 midterm elections.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has hit the campaign trail for Jones. 

As the Republican, Moore has long been expected to win in the deep-red state. But more recent polls have proved surprisingly close, with the RealClearPolitics poll average currently putting Moore up only 6 points over Jones.

The survey of 503 people was conducted from Oct. 24 to 26 by both landlines and cell phones. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.47 percentage points.