The Ehrlich-O'Malley rematch is official (assuming they beat their token primary opponents,  of course.).

Presidential Tracking Polls

Gallup's tracking poll shows President Obama at 48% approve/44% disapprove. His approval stays the same as yesterday, while his disapproval numbers fell by two points. This means that Obama's drop over the weekend likely wasn't just the result of a bad sample on Friday, and that there has been a measurable fading of his bounce.

In the Rasmussen tracking poll, the President's approval numbers stayed stable, with 47% approving of his performance and 30% strongly approving. The number strongly disapproving ticked down a notch, to 43%, while his total disapproval number picked up a point, to 53%. It's interesting that the Rasmussen and Gallup approval numbers have converged, even though Rasmussen is polling likely voters and Gallup is not.

In the USA Today/Gallup poll taken over the weekend, the President maintains a 47% approval rating, with 50% disapproving. Two-thirds of voters think the health care bill costs too much and expands the role of health care too far, 50% think passage is a bad thing, and 53% thought the Democrats' tactics constituted an abuse of power. This is representative of most polling I've seen this cycle, where the President enjoys tepid approval ratings on the topline, but the secondary “issue” numbers are horrendous. Whether this means that the President's approval numbers are artificially inflated remains to be seen.

Senate

Missouri Senate: Public Policy Polling (D) is the latest pollster to find that the race to replace retiring Senator Kit Bond is very close. Congressman Roy Blunt leads Secretary of State Robin Carnahan by a 45%-41% margin. My suspicion is that as the race wears on, unless the President's numbers turn around significantly, Blunt will open up a lead over Carnahan; the President (and as PPP points out, the health care bill as well) is simply too unpopular in the state for her to be favored to win right now. Interestingly, the Secretary of State with the famous family name is at 42% against State Senator Chuck Purgason, who is challenging Blunt in the primary (and who receives 38% of the vote against Carnahan).

Ohio Senate Primary: Quinnipiac surveyed the Democratic primary in the Senate race to replace retiring Senator George Voinovich, and found that Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher leads Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner 33%-26%. Undecided is the big winner with 40%. Moreover, nearly a third of each candidate's supporters said that they might change their minds between today and the May 4 Democratic primary. Both candidates have extremely low unfavorables among the electorate, indicating that the race will probably come down to which candidate can best get his or her message out between now and the primary.

Kansas Senate Primary: It appears to be primary polling day. SurveyUSA polled the Kansas Senate race and found that First District Representative Jerry Moran leads Fourth District Representative Todd Tiahrt 42%-32%. Moran leads by a huge margin in western Kansas – the area he represents in Congress – while Tiahrt leads in Southeastern Kansas, which is the hub of his Wichita –based district. Both men are solid conservatives, though Tiahrt probably is more directly affiliated with the religious right, which may explain Moran's somewhat-better showing among moderates and liberals.

The winner will face either Attorney Stanley Wiles or Democratic activist Charles Schollenberger. The state has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since the 1932 elections.

Governor

South Dakota: The nation's longest gubernatorial winning streak looks like it will continue. Democrats have not won the South Dakota Governor's seat since 1974, and if Scott Rasmussen is to be believed, they aren't going to win it in 2010 either. Lieutenant Governor Dennis Daugaard holds a 17-point lead (49%-32%) over Democratic State Senator and Minority Leader Scott Heidepriem. Heidepriem does hold small leads over State Senate Majority Leader Dave Knudson (37%-32%) and State Senator Gordon Howie (39%-34%), so if either were to win the nomination, we would have to re-evaluate the race.

Alabama Primary: The good folk at Public Policy Polling also decided to poll the Alabama gubernatorial primary races . They found that Congressman and ObamaCare “no” voter Artur Davis leads Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks with 38% of the vote to Sparks' 28%; inventor Sam Franklin Thomas receives 9%.

On the GOP side, PPP polled five of the eight Republicans in the race: Former Community College System Chancellor Bradley Byrne, famous “Ten Commandments” former Chief Justice Roy Moore, State Treasurer Kay Ivey, State Rep. Robert Bentley and Real Estate Developer Tim James. It's a pretty wide open affair. Byrne receives 27% of the vote from respondents; Moore 23%; Ivey 10%; Bentley 10%; James 9%. Not polled were sales representative Charles Taylor, financial analyst James Potts, and former Birmingham City Councilman Bill Johnson.

It's pretty amazing to see an eight-way GOP primary in Alabama; the state didn't have a single contested Republican primary for Governor until 1978.

House

Gallup's weekly polling of the generic ballot does show a bounce . . . for the Republicans. They now lead 47%-44% in the poll of registered voters. Mind you, the GOP traditionally performs a few points better than the Gallup poll's final results suggest, and that poll will use a likely voter model.

Speaking of which, there is a reason that the GOP performs so much better in likely voter models these days. The Gallup page I linked also shows that 50% of Republicans are enthusiastic about voting, as opposed to 35% of Democrats and 38% of Independents.  Since certainty about voting in November's elections is often a criterion for screening out unlikely voters, we should expect to see more and more Republicans finding their way into poll responses.  This represents an improvement for Democrats over last week's results -- they did get the "Base Bounce" they expected -- but it is also an improvement for Republicans and Independents. Congress sports a Jeffrey Dahmer-like sixteen percent approval among adults.

Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) represents a district that went overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in 2008, and now runs in a primary where the electorate strongly supports the president's health reform bill. But eyeing the general election, Davis voted against that legislation every time it came up for a vote. And now, a new Public Policy Polling (D) survey shows that it's not yet hurting him in his primary race.

Gubernatorial Primary Election Matchup -- Democrats
(407 Dem RVs, 3/27-29, MoE +/- 4.9%)
Davis 38
Sparks 28
Thomas 9
Und 25

On the GOP side, former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore runs strong in a multi-candidate field, garnering nearly a quarter of the vote. But former state Sen. Bradley Byrne has the edge.

Gubernatorial Primary Election Matchup -- Republicans
(457 GOP RVs, 3/27-29, MoE +/- 4.6%)
Byrne 27
Moore 23
Ivey 10
Bentley 10
James 9
Other 1
Und 20

The general election matchups will be released tomorrow.

Bill  Carter of the New York Times:

CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.

The trend in news ratings for the first three months of this year is all up for one network, the Fox News Channel, which enjoyed its best quarter ever in ratings, and down for both MSNBC and CNN.

CNN had a slightly worse quarter in the fourth quarter of 2009, but the last three months have included compelling news events, like the earthquake in Haiti and the battle over health care, and CNN, which emphasizes its hard news coverage, was apparently unable to benefit.

The losses at CNN continued a pattern in place for much of the last year, as the network trailed its competitors in every prime-time hour. (CNN still easily beats MSNBC in the daytime hours, but those are less lucrative in advertising money, and both networks are far behind Fox News at all hours.)

I've hit upon a brilliant strategy for CNN to reverse its rating slide: fire Jon Klein and hire Roger Ailes.

UPDATE: On the flip side, FOX News had its best quarter in history in Q1 of this year.

Roger Cohen seems to have suffered a blow to the head that's left him disoriented. How else to explain these opening lines from his column this morning?

BRUSSELS — The passage of the U.S. health care bill is a major foreign policy victory for President Barack Obama.

It empowers him by demonstrating his ability to deliver. Nowhere is that more important than in the Middle East.

Yes, I'm sure the leaders of Hamas are so impressed by Obama's "stick-to-it-ive-ness" on health care that they're going to sit right down and be reasonable in negotiating with Israel. And I'll bet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will stop building nuclear weapons, too, now that 32 million more Americans will get health insurance coverage starting in 2014.

I jest, of course, because it's utter fantasy to argue that health care is some sort of "foreign policy victory" for Obama. It's certainly a domestic victory for the President - and a better outcome for him than the alternative - though the most recent polls provide a decidedly mixed picture of just how much he's gained politically from it at home.

Another nit to pick in Cohen's column is this little ditty:

It fell to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, to play the role Khrushchev once played in toughening a young American president.

The former Soviet leader thought he could browbeat Kennedy only to discover, in Vienna, that the Kennedy charm was not unalloyed to steel (“It will be a long, cold winter.”) Netanyahu was the first foreign leader to think he could steamroll Obama. He earned a frosty comeuppance.

The analogy is fine, so long as you ignore the fact that Krushchev was the leader of America's Cold War arch enemy while Netanyahu leads a country that is America's greatest ally in the Middle East and a country with whom we've had a long, deep, and unique relationship for the last six decades.

UPDATE: A reader points out something I skipped right over: namely, that Cohen's analogy is bogus on historical grounds as well:

Additionally, Cohen's comparison is absurd even from Cohen's own point-of-view, because (contrary to his claim) Kennedy WAS browbeaten and steamrolled by Khrushchev at Vienna. Kennedy sadly admitted to his aides that Nikita treated him "like I was a little boy" and that -- if not in so many words -- he felt out of his depth. For his part, Khrushchev sensed deep confusion and weakness on Kennedy's part, and two months later the Berlin Wall went up, virtually overnight. Also, JFK's apparent weakness in Vienna greatly emboldened the Kremlin in its tentative decision to send nukes to Cuba. Kennedy's effective do-nothing response to the construction of the Berlin Wall also played a role, of course.

UPDATE: Daniel Larison has more in the same vein.

Interesting piece in yesterday's Seattle Times about nuclear waste from the site in Hanford. Basically, it's just sitting there with no place to go since President Obama decided to pull the plug on Yucca Mountain - a decision that hasn't sat well with those in Washington State and other places around the country (like Aiken, South Carolina) who were counting on science winning out over politics:

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., angrily challenged Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, in a public hearing: "What seems to be missing [in the decision] is the why."

In a rambling answer, Chu said, "Other things, other knowledge, other conditions as they evolved made [Yucca Mountain] look increasingly not like an ideal choice."

When Murray asked for scientific evidence, Chu said, "It's an unfolding of issues that continued, and I would be happy to talk to you in detail about some of the issues."

Yucca had legitimate problems, said Tom Cochran, a nuclear physicist with the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council. The site rests above a water table, and moisture leaks through. It might not have been big enough to hold all the waste.

Still, "I wouldn't have done it the way Obama did it," Cochran said. "He came in saying he was going to make decisions based on science. In this case, I think it was a political debt to Harry Reid."

A new Public Policy Polling survey finds Rep. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) leading Sec. of State Robin Carnahan (D) by 4 points in the open Senate seat race in Missouri. While the race remains extremely close, PPP reports that the unpopularity of health care reform (54% oppose) in the state has helped push Blunt out in front.

“The Missouri Senate race has very little to do with Roy Blunt or Robin Carnahan and everything to do with Barack Obama right now,” said PPP president Dean Debnam. “If his numbers don't improve it will be very hard for Carnahan to win.”

Blunt 45
Carnhan 41
Und 13

The survey was conducted March 27-28 of 495 RV with a MoE of +/- 4.4%.

The tea party movement, at its core, is comprised of individuals who "question my legitimacy," President Obama says.

In an interview that aired this morning on NBC's "Today" show, Matt Lauer asked Obama for his opinion of the movement, saying some view it as a fringe group and others a legitimate political movement. The president said it is a "loose amalgam of forces," but that at its heart are the same kind of people that emerged in the final months of the 2008 presidential race questioning his citizenship.

Beyond that group, he added, there is a "broader circle" who are "legitimately concerned about the deficit, who are legitimately concerned that the federal government may be taking on too much."

"Last year, a bunch of the emergency measures we had to take in terms of dealing with the bank crisis, bailing out the auto industry, fed that sense that things are out of control," he said. "I think those are folks who have legitimate concerns."

Obama said he hoped to win over that group as his administration works to tackle the deficit, mentioning his proposed domestic spending freeze. But, he added: "There's still going to be a group at their core that question my legitimacy or question the Democratic Party generally or question people who they consider to be against them in some way. And that group we're probably not going to convince."

You can see the full clip here. His full answer is available after the jump.

(more...)

Faced with a growing gap in primary polls, Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson (R) this week launched a provocative campaign ad charging that rival Rand Paul (R) "even wonders whether 9/11 was our fault." The Lexington Herald Leader reports that the spot backs the claim up with a clip of Paul speaking at the Blue Grass Policy Institute forum in March 2009, saying: “Maybe some of the bad things that happen are a reaction to our presence in some of these countries.”

Grayson, endorsed recently by former Vice President Cheney, has launched a Web site called RandPaulStrangeIdeas.com as part of a renewed effort to draw attention to what he feels are positions outside the conservative mainstream.

Today, Rand Paul rebuts the Grayson ad with a new TV ad of his own:

His ad includes 15 seconds of footage of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. He says Grayson uses 9/11 "to attack my integrity and my patriotism." He says to Grayson that the ad is a "lie, and dishonors you."

We already saw 9/11 an issue in another primary this year -- when Debra Medina would not dispute the notion that the attacks were an "inside job." It ultimately stalled her momentum, but she did finish with 19 percent of the vote in that three-way Texas gubernatorial primary.

A new survey from USA Today/Gallup taken this past weekend shows President Obama's job approval rating upside down, with 47% approving of the job he's doing as President but a record 50% disapproving. The details of the polls as it relates to the public's impression of the newly passed health care legislation, is pretty grim for the President and his party:

- Close to 2/3 say the bill "costs too much and expands the government's role in health care too far."

- 50% call passage of the bill a "bad thing" while 47% consider it a "good thing."

- 53% say the Democrats' tactics in passing the bill constitute an "abuse of power" while 40% say they were appropriate.

As Sean noted last night, a new CNN poll shows a modest bump for President Obama's job rating, but overall the President appears to have received very little - if any - benefit for the passage of health care in terms of public opinion. Overall, Obama's job approval in the RCP Average currently stands at 48.2%, with 46.7% disapproving.