It's the poll on the Alabama Senate race that's arched eyebrows and dropped jaws.

Is a Democratic candidate in deep red Alabama really tied with a Republican candidate as the state hurtles toward the Dec. 12 election?

The poll came from Fox News earlier this week. But somehow the cable news outlet favored by President Trump and typically identified with conservative GOP views came up with a result that gave an unexpected jolt to the race between Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore.

The poll said that both Jones and Moore had 42 percent support from the pool of 801 participants.

It led to comments disparaging the poll from Terry Lathan, chair of the Alabama Republican Party, as well as similar tweets from Moore's campaign account.

The consternation over the poll came in the fine print.

Every other Senate poll - which has indicated Moore leads anywhere from six to 11 points - has sampled "likely voters." The Fox poll sampled "registered voters."

In retweeting a story from Conservative Review, Moore's campaign Twitter accounted lifted an excerpt from the story that said "a poll of likely voters is a more accurate representation of any race compared to registered voters."

Today, a poll of 3,000 likely voters in the race shows Judge Roy Moore leading Democrat Doug Jones by double digits.

...a poll of likely voters is a more accurate representation of any race compared to registered voters. https://t.co/da0epXiei8#MooreSenate #ALSEN #ALpolitics — Judge Roy Moore (@RealJudgeMoore) October 20, 2017

Lathan, in a story on Breitbart News - which is overseen by Moore supporter Stephen Bannon - said the Fox poll was "highly inaccurate" and "an extreme outlier."

Is this just Republican panic over a closer-than-expected race or did the Fox poll, using registered voters instead of likely voters, provide a false indicator of where the race stands?

AL.com contacted three Alabama pollsters to get their perspectives.

The consensus was that the Fox poll was out of step with four other polls that have Moore in control. But the pollsters also had their own unique views about the Fox poll.

"My take on whether it is a registered or likely voter sample, I don't think that comparison is a reason to demonize this poll," said Kevin Akins, a Democratic pollster for ALG Research in Montgomery.

"When people ask me about the Fox News poll, my first response is, I don't have the foggiest idea what their poll model was," said Jonathan Gray, a Republican pollster and partner at Strategy Public Relations in Mobile. "But I know this: Of the other five polls that are out there, they are the outlier. They are the one that's kind of our here in la-la land."

"The Fox News poll is definitely an outlier," said Brent Buchanan, president of Montgomery-based Cygnal - which conducted a poll earlier this month that gave Moore an 8-point lead. "Polling all registered voters -- without a likely voter screen -- for a special election is like asking everyone at your church what their favorite potluck dish is when you really only care what the church staff thinks."

Gray's company conducted the Raycom poll released Thursday that gave Moore an 11-point edge - his largest polling advantage of the campaign.

Gray said he put three qualifiers on his sample pool in an effort to make sure he was polling people who would be voting in December.

"They had to be an active registered voter in Alabama," he said. "They must have voted in the 2016 general election. They had to tell us on the survey that they were going to vote in the general election in December. If those three things were true, we counted their vote."

Of course, there is an obvious difference between registered voters and likely voters. More than 3 million people are registered to vote in Alabama but barely more than 2 million voted in the presidential election last November. Still, that was the third-highest voter turnout in state history even as 1 million people stayed home.

Voter turnout dropped to about 20 percent for the Senate primaries in August - or, put another way, 80 percent of registered voters opted not to vote.

"What we know about a special election is that you've really kind of got to be dedicated to politics or care enough to go vote in a special," Gray said. "And I can't predict who is going to go vote in a special. But I can tell you this: If they didn't vote in the third-largest election in state history (last year), they're probably not going to vote in some random special election in December."

That's why Gray said he put that qualifier in his poll.

Akins said polling for a special election is more difficult than in a regular election cycle.

"I would say we typically conduct likely voter polls," he said. "To conduct a likely voter poll for a special election is a voodoo art all its own. It's why all over the country in special elections, polling has been all over the place more so than the general election. Polling still works but figuring out who might turn out is very complicated.

"If I was doing a poll of this race, it would be a likely voter. But it would be fairly loose to allow some atypical voters in the race. It would not be a stereotypical likely voter poll. It would not be just a registered voter poll. I would probably have something in between. And that's probably the reason I don't completely write off the Fox poll yet."

Akins also pointed out that Jones has released television campaign ads in recent weeks while Moore has not.

"I look at that (Fox) poll and said, Hey, Doug Jones is on TV since the last poll I saw, Roy Moore is not," Akins said. "This race is probably tightening up a little bit."

Gray, the Republican pollster, wouldn't necessarily disagree with that.

"I do think it's a competitive race," said Gray, who has been closely observing Alabama politics for 20 years. "Because we're talking about this race. I can tell you what competitive races look like in Alabama.

"Do the numbers bear that out? Yeah, they do. If all the undecideds collapsed for Doug Jones based on the polling I put out for Raycom, you'd have a 51-49 race and that's a coin toss."

Both Gray and Akins agree that the race will come down to turnout. Akins spoke in terms of "surge voting," which he attributed to Randall Woodfin's defeat of incumbent William Bell to win Birmingham's mayoral election last week.

And if one candidate is more likely to benefit from surge voting, Akins said it would be Jones.

"I think Roy Moore's voters are going to be there no matter what," Akins said. "They were sort of baked into the cake - a higher voter turnout, a slightly more rural vote than urban vote, a slightly heavy white vote and strong support in an evangelical community. I think Roy Moore's turnout was already baked into the cake.

"The question is going to be whether Democrats are going to be excited and engaged to turnout for Doug Jones or not. It's certainly been a while they had someone strong to turn out for in this state."

While Gray said he believes the Fox poll to be an outlier, he said he has no doubt it was a legitimate poll.

"I'm not going to accuse Fox News and those pollsters of messing with the numbers," he said. "I really don't think they did that. I don't believe anybody did that."

And at the end of the day, a poll is just a poll.

"Right now," Gray said, "my poll is no better than their poll or anybody else's poll."