Recent punditry on Alabama’s upcoming special election for U.S. Senate has a distinct theme: The race between Republican Roy Moore and Democrat Doug Jones is “impossible to poll” because “nobody has any clue what turnout is going to look like.” That difficulty, combined with the controversies surrounding Moore, put Jones “just a normal polling error way from a win” in heavily-Republican Alabama, though “it’s all but impossible” to predict the winner.

Data collected by SurveyMonkey confirms these arguments. Minor differences in the methods used to model or select the likely electorate produce wildly varying estimates in Alabama. Data collected over the past week, with different models applied, show everything between an 8 eight percentage point margin favoring Jones and a 9 percentage point margin favoring Moore.

The same survey data also reveal the underlying tensions behind the volatile results: Alabama Democrats are angry and energized, while a significant but critical minority of Republicans are conflicted between a nominee they dislike and a President they support.

“Special elections are extremely hard to poll,” political scientist Jonathan Bernstein recently tweeted, “even when they’re not as screwy as this one.” This particular election has two especially unique elements: First, it involves a special election in mid-December, so historical turnout data from previous comparable elections does not exist. Second, Republican nominee Moore has been mired for weeks in allegations over his alleged sexual misconduct, prompting prominent Republicans to either throw their support to Jones or, like Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, pledge to write-in another name. The combination makes the pollster’s biggest challenge – modeling the likely electorate – that much tougher.