Research 2000 does NC

Research 2000 and Daily Kos have a new poll for the 2010 North Carolina Senate picture.

They find relatively similar favorables for Roy Cooper and Richard Burr to what we found when we polled on it last month. Cooper has about 2:1 favorables, and Burr is just +1. One place where the polls differ a good bit is on the level of ambivalence toward Burr. We found that 37% of voters have no opinion about him while they found only 7%. Although Burr has stepped up his public relations efforts lately, I don't think it's making that big of a difference. Regardless of these results I continue to believe he is a pretty unknown commodity to the state's voters.

The other difference is that we found Cooper leading Burr by five points in a head to head while R2K finds him trailing by two. I don't think it really matters at this very early stage, but I note that, as happened in its pre election polls last year, Research 2000 finds Democrats losing the white vote by a factor of more than two to one in North Carolina. That didn't happen this year- Kay Hagan got almost 40% of the white vote against Elizabeth Dole- and I don't think it's likely to happen if Cooper ends up as the Democratic nominee either. That's where the discrepancy lies between us showing Cooper up and them showing Burr up.

They also tested Richard Moore, who does not seem likely to run at this point, and found him trailing 46-40.

We're going to be doing our next round of NC Senate 2010 polling over the next week, with Heath Shuler as this month's tested candidate.