Sunday Morning Roundup

-Does Barack Obama have a midwestern problem? 52% of voters there disapproved of him on our national poll this week, by far his worst performance in any region. A new Des Moines Register poll this morning finds him under 50 in Iowa, as did Quinnipiac in Ohio last week. We have a Wisconsin poll in the field this weekend and it looks like Obama will almost certainly be under 50% there, and possibly even in the red. Certainly the region has been hit unusually hard by the economic downturn, and a year after his election some of the blame seems to be shifting from Bush to Obama.

-Speaking of the Wisconsin poll, the impetus for it was to see what impact a Tommy Thompson candidacy might have on the races for Governor and Senate. Somewhat to my surprise he is no longer a particularly popular figure in the state. He would be competitive in a race for either of those offices, but he looks weaker than Scott Walker as a GOP gubernatorial candidate and he doesn't appear to be as popular as Russ Feingold. That said in this political climate- as we saw in Missouri last week- you can suffer from a popularity gap and still poll competitively.

Expect Senate numbers Tuesday, approval numbers Wednesday, Governor numbers Friday. Also tomorrow we're going to have our national look at the Congressional picture out as well as some stuff on corruption in North Carolina.

-Finally it's time to take another round of suggestions for where we poll- because of the holiday this will be fielded Monday-Wednesday the week after Thanksgiving with releases starting Thursday of that week.

Here are my guidelines:

-Statewide polls (I'm going to have a vote in a few weeks on non-southern Congressional districts we're interested in polling)
-We don't want to poll something there are large volumes of recent polling on- trying to do something there's not a lot out there for
-I generally don't like combined primary/general polls- so if a primary is in the next six months like Illinois or Texas we would only do a poll of likely primary voters or of likely general voters. If it's not until next fall like Florida I guess we can still do a combined one of both.

Leave your suggestions in the comments and I'll pick some finalists and let you vote from Wednesday through Sunday.