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If you simply look at the national trends Democrats are in pretty bad shape right now. Barack Obama's approval numbers are hitting record lows in a lot of polling and the balance of the generic ballot surveys show Republicans in the lead. If you look at the trends in the actual races though things are getting sunnier for the Democrats. In June and July PPP polled eight Senate match ups that we had a previous poll to compare to- in all eight the Democratic candidate improved his/her position, by an average of 4.25 points. There's a variety of reason...

Mitt Romney's the favorite at this early stage in a couple key Republican primary states: Florida and Nevada. Romney came up short in Florida last time, but for now Republicans in the state prefer him to the other leading potential 2012 candidates. Romney gets 31% with Palin and Gingrich tied for second at 23% and Huckabee and Paul further back at 15% and 6% respectively. These numbers are good news for Romney and bad news for Huckabee and Palin...

Tuesday, July 20, 2010 Crist Looking Good Thanks mostly to support from Democrats Charlie Crist is the leader in the Florida Senate race. In the most likely match up against Kendrick Meek he gets 35% to 29% for Marco Rubio and 17% for Meek. His lead expands with Jeff Greene as the Democratic nominee. In that scenario Crist gets 38% with Rubio still at 29% and Greene at only 13%. Crist has become the de facto Democratic nominee and that's where most of his support is coming from. He's currently getting 44% of Democrats in the Meek match up, along...

No, this is not coming from Rasmussen or an internal GOP poll, but from the normally Democrat-sympathetic Public Policy Polling. PPP pitted Barack Obama against five potential Republican challengers for the 2012 presidential campaign, and the only one Obama beat was … Jan Brewer. Even that, PPP admitted, resulted from Brewer’s lack of name recognition. The headline, though, is Sarah Palin’s dead heat with the President:

Democrats are going to have to think really carefully about how they deploy Barack Obama for campaigning this fall. Polls we've conducted nationally and in several different states over the last few weeks have found that a candidate being endorsed by Obama is much more likely to elicit a negative response from Republican voters than a positive one from Democrats. PPP's most recent national survey found that while Obama had a positive approval rating at 48/47, only 33% of voters were more likely to vote for a candidate endorsed by him while 48% said support from Obama would make them...

Turning to California, we noted last week that a poll, this one by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), indicated Carly Fiorina had moved ahead of Tom Campbell, albeit the two candidates were both within the margin of error. Still, the poll was significant in that Campbell had consistently been narrowly ahead of Fiorina for weeks and this was the first poll to reverse that trend. We wondered at the time if the poll could have been an outlier. Late yesterday Survey USA released a poll which threw cold water on the idea that the PPIC poll was an...

If the Republican candidates for President in 2012 were Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Ron Paul, and Mitt Romney who would you vote for? If Newt Gingrich, press 1. If Mike Huckabee, press 2. If Sarah Palin, press 3. If Ron Paul, press 4. If Mitt Romney, press 5. If you’re undecided, press 6 Gingrich ........... 16% Huckabee............ 18% Palin............... 29% Paul ................ 9% Romney ............. 25% Undecided............ 3% Compared to April's survey: Huckabee......... 17% Palin............ 25% Romney........... 44% Undecided........ 14%http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_FLCO_311.pdf April had no Gingrich or Paul as options It would appear that Gingrich played the Grinch, and took...

Tuesday, April 27, 2010 Brewer Gains Ground After Signing Immigration Bill [Daniel Foster] Public Policy Polling's latest shows that, in signing the immigration bill, Arizona governor Janice Brewer has shored up her support among Republicans in a difficult reelection bid against Democrat Terry Goddard: In the most likely match up for this fall Goddard leads Brewer 47-44. That represents a tightening since Goddard held a 46-36 lead over her last fall. Partisan preferences have hardened in the wake of Brewer's signing a tough immigration bill last week. Where Brewer was getting only 59% of the Republican vote in our last...

ARLINGTON, Va. - A lawsuit which could delay the Virginia HOT lanes project will go forward, a U.S. District Court ruled Thursday. The suit, filed by the Arlington County Board, says the high occupancy toll lanes planned for a stretch of Interstate 95/395 are intended to benefit mainly rich, white, suburban and rural residents of Stafford and Spotsylvania counties. The new toll road is planned to run between Spotsylvania County and the D.C. line. Arlington says the added traffic would come at the expense of the county's diverse urban population and constitute a violation of civil rights. "We'll find out...

Tom Jensen at Public Policy Polling sums up their polling data in the "Big Ten" midwestern states. If the election were held tomorrow, Democrats would lose big: It's really looking like a brutal year for Democrats in the Big Ten states. Barack Obama's approval numbers in the two places we polled this week- Wisconsin and Ohio- tell the story. He won Wisconsin by 14 points in 2008 but we find his approval there at a net -2 (46/48) for a 16 point drop since the election. It's a similar story in Ohio. He won there by four points in 2008...

Barack Obama peaked in our national polling at a 55/38 spread last May. Now he's at 48/47. What's most interesting to note about that shift in his numbers is that it has come completely among white people. In May his approval with racial minorities was a 73/17 spread and now it's an almost identical 77/17. But with whites he's fallen from slightly positive ground at 48/45 to strongly negative territory at 37/58. That is part of the problem for Democrats this year in the midterm election. While white voters were only 74% of the electorate in 2008, they made up...

You wouldn't know it from reading the blogosphere but liberal Democrats are actually pretty happy with the direction of their party right now. On our most recent national poll 76% expressed that sentiment. The other wings of the party are not that content- 58% of moderates say they like where the party's headed but only 39% of conservatives do. Those conservative Democrats unhappy with their party aren't complaining too loudly about it- they're just going out and voting for Republicans, as many of them did on Tuesday in Massachusetts. On the whole Democrats (60%) are happier with their party than...

With Democratic fortunes declining nationally it should perhaps come as no surprise that Barack Obama has now hit his lowest level of approval yet in North Carolina. 44% of voters like the job he's doing to 50% who are unhappy with him. Obama's lower numbers are due largely to movement among independents. They've been pretty evenly divided about him through most of his first year in office but are now splitting against him by a 61/33 margin. As has always been the case most Democrats (73%) approve the job he's doing while most Republicans (88%) don't. Obama's health care plan...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee fares the best against pro-abortion President Barack Obama in a polling of voters previewing potential 2012 presidential election matchups. This is the first time in the PPP poll that any of the potential candidates has led Obama. The Public Policy Polling firm, which is Democratic by respected for fairly accurate results, found Obama trails a pro-life opponent for the first time. Huckabee has a 45-44 advantage over Obama, aided largely by a 44-38 lead with independents. The former governor's 35/29 favorability breakdown, with 35 percent of all voters saying they have...

If Martha Coakley loses tomorrow it will certainly have a lot to do with her running a poor campaign, but ultimately it will be a repudiation of the President. Scott Brown is winning 20% of the vote from people who voted for Barack Obama last year, but these are not people who think he's doing a great job and just think Coakley is a duddy candidate. For the most part it's people who voted for Obama and aren't happy with how he's performed in office. Among the Obama/Brown voters just 22% approve of the President's work and only 13% support...

The Massachusetts Senate race is now a toss up. Buoyed by a huge advantage with independents and relative disinterest from Democratic voters in the state, Republican Scott Brown leads Martha Coakley 48-47. Here are the major factors leading to this surprising state of affairs: -As was the case in the Gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia last year, it looks like the electorate in Massachusetts will be considerably more conservative than the one that showed up in 2008. Obama took the state by 26 points then, but those planning to vote next week only report having voted for him...

I spent some today compiling approval ratings on 33 different Governors- pollster.com averages when they were available and the most recent polls I could find when they weren't. Here's what I found on three different points of comparison: -The average approval on Governors from states with populations below the national median was 51%, while it was 42% for those from bigger states. A couple reasons for that I think- Governors in small states have fewer media markets to deal with and can maintain a higher level of visibility, which leaves voters feeling more connected with them. And although this is...

One underplayed aspect of this year's elections that I think could make an impact is the return of disaffected Republicans who didn't even bother coming out to vote in 2008 because they were unhappy about the nomination of John McCain. They may have felt it didn't make any difference who they voted for then, but feel differently about things now that they've seen the impact of Democratic control in Washington. On the Virginia exit poll 94% of respondents said who they voted for President last year and their responses average out to a 13.2% advantage for Bob McDonnell. Since McDonnell...

There's all sorts of speculation and back of the envelope math being done right now on the Massachusetts Senate special election and whether Republican Scott Brown might be able to pull off a surprise there. Dave Weigel reports that Rasmussen is going to be polling there tonight so that should give us a better idea but I thought it would be worth taking a look at what would happen if things played out in Masschusetts similarly to Virginia, which is a sort of Democratic worst case scenario. The Virginia exit poll showed the folks who turned out there voted for...

This is a surprising result from Public Policy Polling, the occasionally partisan group which nonetheless called the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races accurately. Mitt Romney’s favorable rating among Republican voters has fallen to 48 percent–a plurality, but a weak one. And the trend lines are even more interesting. Since April, when PPP started asking the question, Sarah Palin’s favorable number has moved from 76 percent to 75 percent; Mike Huckabee’s has moved from 67 percent to 65 percent. Romney, alone, has seen a statistically significant drop from 60 percent down to 48. The results are so strange that PPP’s...