The Alabama Poll

§1About

✎ Drafted by AI from the public sources cited. Each sentence links to its source.

The Alabama Poll describes itself on its website as a subscription polling service for businesses and associations in Alabama, and a March 2026 release calls it an independent, subscription-based public opinion research service focused on Alabama politics, public policy and elections.^1,2 Its About page names Michael T. Lowry as its founder and principal and says he re-established the poll; the same page says he was most recently chief of staff to Republican Congressman Robert Aderholt, founded the Washington, D.C. lobbying and government affairs firm Backstop Strategies, and has worked alongside pollsters for President Donald Trump, whom it does not name.¹ Its How it Works page describes annual fee-based subscriptions built around quarterly polls of 20 to 30 questions, with subscribers able to add private questions of their own for an extra fee.³ The March 2026 release, datelined Montgomery, says its survey of 600 likely Republican primary voters combined live landline and cell phone interviews with self-administered text message surveys.²

Kind

Commercial firm^2,3

§2Who it works with

Why this matters: Owners, news partners and the firms behind a poll's interviews shape what gets asked, how, and what gets published.

§3Whom it works for

Why this matters: A firm that also works for one party's campaigns can still publish accurate polls, but readers deserve to know.

Says it does no work for parties or candidates. Its March 2026 release describes The Alabama Poll as independent and says it is not employed by any candidate campaigns; this rests on its own description, and neither that release nor its website says whether it works for party committees.^1,2

Of its 2 polls listed since the 2024 election, VoteHub flags 0 as paid for by a Democratic-aligned sponsor and 0 by a Republican-aligned sponsor⁴.

Federal campaigns and committees that paid it

From 2023 through 2026, 1 federal committee reported paying The Alabama Poll $32,500 for polling, surveys or research^5,6,7,8. By the party each committee reports to the FEC: 0 Democratic, 0 Republican, and 1 none (most PACs and super PACs report none).

§42026 record against the count

Why this matters: How close this pollster's last 2026 polls came to how people voted, measured the way FiveThirtyEight measured earlier elections.

2 polls of 2 races between a Democrat and a Republican, with field periods ending in the 21 days before November 3, 2026, compared with each race's count. Some of those races are still being counted, so these figures use the unofficial count and will change until states certify.

Average miss

R+9.8

Relative to other polls of the same races

R+5.4

Typical size of miss

9.8 pts

Error is the poll's D−R margin minus the count's, as shares of all votes in the race; D+ means it showed Democrats doing better than they did. From fewer than 5 polls, so read it as a few data points, not a pattern.

§5Its polls

§6What we looked for and didn't find

• No original founding or relaunch date was found; its About page says Lowry re-established the poll, and its How it Works page mentions founder's pricing for subscribers who joined in 2025.
• Its website gives no headquarters address; the only location found is the Montgomery dateline on its March 2026 release.
• No ownership information was found beyond Lowry's role as founder and principal.
• No standing news partner is named. Its releases have appeared in several Alabama outlets, its homepage links to an article by Lowry in Alabama Daily News, and the sample release on AL.com could not be fetched.
• Its website names no subscribers or clients, and no fieldwork vendor; its About page refers to Trump's pollsters without naming them.
• Searches found no AAPOR statement, court ruling, regulator action, aggregator statement about excluding or reweighting its polls, or retraction; AAPOR's public statements page names none of the firms in this batch.