Barack Obama is polling better in the first month of 2011 than he has since late 2009. A new Public Policy Polling survey of voter preferences looking way ahead to November 2012 buttresses recent gains in job approval in other surveys.
Obama would beat Republican presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee by five-point margins, around the same margin that Obama outpolled Republican nominee John McCain by in the 2008 election. PPP measured Obama’s standing against Newt Gingrich at a 12-point lead, and its poll has Obama leading Sarah Palin by 17 points.
Two keys in the internals: “Democrats have really rallied around him since the party’s defeat in November, and he continues to benefit from a pretty weak field of potential opponents,” said Dean Debnam, president of Public Policy Polling.
A third factor emerges from a look inside the internals. Obama is picking up support among Republican voters. Obama’s numbers among GOP voters has improved around 10 percent against each of the potential GOP candidates tested in the PPP polling.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at [email protected].
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