You've read on Daily Kos that the Republican primary is hurting, not helping that party. You've read that President Obama should be considered the favorite, but not a lock, in November. You've also read that Mitt Romney is disliked.
That and more are corroborated in the new NBC/WSJ poll.
This is not a good day to be a Republican. With Super Tuesday looming tomorrow and with Romney consolidating his position, the damaging poll out today suggests voters are rejecting the GOP in large numbers. From the WSJ:
Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the survey along with Democrat Peter Hart, said he could think of only one word to encapsulate the effect of the nomination fight on his party and its candidates: "Corrosive."
The process, Mr. McInturff said, "is sanding down both the Republican candidates and voters' feelings about the party."
Consider this one number:
Does a better job in appealing to those who aren’t hard-core supporters:
Democrats 57 (including 35% of Republicans who agree)
Republicans 26
From
First Read:
The damage from the Republican primary season – in addition to a rising job-approval rating for President Obama and more optimism about the U.S. economy – has given Democrats an early advantage for November’s general election.
Indeed, the president’s job-approval rating now stands at 50 percent; Obama leads Romney in a hypothetical general-election match up by six points; and Democrats hold a five-point edge on the generic congressional ballot.
If this poll’s outlook on the 2012 race were a cocktail, Hart says, it would be “one part Obama, one part the economy, and three parts the Republican Party’s destruction.”
Obama is at 50%, leads Romney by 6, and Democrats lead on the generic Congressional ballot by 5. Thank you, Republicans.
Oh, there's more.
Romney's fav/unfav is -11: In fact, Romney’s image right now is worse than almost all other recent candidates who went on to win their party’s presidential nomination: Obama’s favorable/unfavorable ratio was 51/28 percent and John McCain’s was 47/27, in the March 2008 NBC/WSJ poll; John Kerry was at 42/30 at this point in 2004; George W. Bush was 43/32 in 2000; and Bob Dole was 35/39 in March 1996.
The one exception: Bill Clinton, in April 1992, was at 32/43 percent.
Obama's standing is bolstered by optimism on the economy (57% say the worst is behind us) and according to Peter Hart, the Democratic half of the Hart-McInturff combo that runs the poll, says “President Obama is probably in the best political shape he’s been in since his initial year as president.”
That being said, the Republicans probably are at their worst.
The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted from Feb. 29 through March 3 of 800 adults (including 200 by cellphone), and it has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.5 percentage points. The poll also contains an oversample of 185 interviews to achieve a total of 400 GOP primary voters, and that margin of error is plus-minus 4.9 percentage points