Part of the drop in Moore's odds seems to come from the fact that Moore's endorsements from outside Alabama seem to be drying up. Mike Lee, for example, "withdrew" his endorsement. Note the quote marks. A few points are in order about endorsements.
1) There are two choices. Moore and Jones. Any refusal to endorse Jones is at least a tacit acceptance of Moore-- the child molester. I haven't seen prominent Republicans endorse Jones. Why not? Apparently, at best, they can bring themselves to believe that a Democrat is only as bad as a child molester. This is what Abramowitz and Webster would call, "negative partisanship."
2) Endorsements can have limited value here. They can send important signals, sometimes in primaries, when voters have limited information (remember 2016, though). If there is a wide discrepancy between endorsements, the more widely-endorsed candidate can have an advantage, but that requires a couple of things. First, it works when the endorsements are a substitute for other information. This is a high-profile election, and Alabama voters know and love Roy Moore because of his idiotic, bullshit antics. Also, Roy Moore is a Republican running in Alabama. Counteracting that would be hard. Finally, if the endorsements for Jones all came from out-of-state, you'd have localism fighting the effect, particularly in a state like Alabama.
3) In order for endorsements to switch this race, someone Alabama voters trust would have to endorse Jones. I don't know who that would be. Rush Limbaugh? David Duke? I don't know...
Moore isn't an absolute lock, but at the end of the day, he's a Republican who won over the voters of Alabama long ago, and like I said yesterday, he passed the Edwin Edwards test. Without a mass of Republicans-- particularly Alabama Republicans-- endorsing Jones, the odds still favor Moore, and even seeing some withdrawn endorsements, we aren't seeing that.
