Crossover Appeal in North Carolina

Since December PPP has done approval or favorability ratings on seven different politicians. What we've found is that most folks receive highly partisan reviews: folks within their own party generally have a positive opinion of them and ones in the opposite party do not.

Here's how those folks stack up in terms of their favorability ratings across party lines:

Roy Cooper	31%
Richard Burr	21%
Bev Perdue	15%
Barack Obama	12%
Heath Shuler	11%
Jim Neal	4%
Cal Cunningham	2%

A PPP analysis of our national polling conducted last week found that Cooper's 31% favorability rating with Republicans put him in the 90th percentile of the 40 politicians we've tested in states around the country so far in 2009. That's an unusually high level of crossover appeal. It's not a surprise that Cooper is the top choice of most Democrats to challenge Burr next year.

Burr comes in next at 21%. North Carolina is a strongly Democratic state, at least in terms of party identification, and any Republican who is successful statewide needs to be able to peel off a number of voters from the other party. He was able to do that against Erskine Bowles in 2004 but may have a harder time doing so again if he's challenged by the highly popular Cooper.

Other than those two, most of these politicians do not seem to have a high level of bipartisan appeal.