Kay Hagan's approval is split 32/32, numbers almost identical to a 33/33 split the last time we polled it in April.
On the surface it may seem like nothing's changed in the last three months but within the crosstabs there's a pretty interesting trend. Among Democrats her numbers are down, from a 51/13 spread then to a 44/19 one now. But among Republicans and independents she's up, improving from 9/57 to 14/51 with the GOP and from 28/39 to 33/32 with those in the middle.
Hagan's been getting the most attention in recent days for her views on the health care bill, taking some heat from Democrats for not being supportive enough of President Obama's agenda on the issue. It does seem like that's knocked down her numbers a little bit with the party's base, but at the same time it seems her independence is helping her a little in the center and across the aisle. All in all it's a wash when it comes to her popularity.
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Tom, I have to question your analysis on a "shift" in Hagan's approvals among subgroups. You've got 767 total respondents with a 3.5% error margin, and those subgroups have fewer than 500 Democrats and maybe 255 Republicans. What are the margins of error for those subsamples? They must be sky-high, to a point that I have to think a 10-point shift is not really a "shift" at all but rather a mirage. It's always tempting to read a lot into the internals, but without oversampling a subgroup (as campaigns do when they REALLY want to know what's happening with Hispanics or blacks or people in a particular region of a state, and so on), it's simply not realistic to read too much into it.
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