Those liberals at Civitas...

Today Civitas came out with a poll showing Barack Obama's NC approval rating at 66%, with Bev Perdue's at 47% and Kay Hagan's at 40%. Our most recent look at each of them had Obama's approval at 51, Perdue's at 34, and Hagan's at 33. In other words the conservative polling firm shows these three Democratic officials with an average approval rating 12 points higher than we do.

There are a couple take aways from this:

-Although I think Civitas' issue polling is often biased and serves no point other than to push their policy agenda, I think the way their polls are conducted is perfectly sound and yields reasonable horse race and approval numbers.

-The second is that I just continue to think that voters are more willing to be negative about their politicians on automated polls than to live interviewers. For almost every politician we do approval ratings for they get worse numbers than any other poll shows- and that's true for both Democrats and Republicans. I can't remember us getting criticized any time in the near past for putting out an approval on someone that was too high.

We're going to be putting out a pretty stunning poll on a midwestern Governor up for reelection next year early next week.