Obama ties Romney with Arizona

Arizona is a great microcosm of how Barack Obama's reelection prospects have improved over the last 3 months. When we polled there in November his approval numbers were atrocious and his prospects for winning the state in the general election didn't look very good. Now he's getting more popular, the Republicans are getting less popular, and he appears to have a decent chance there.

Obama is tied with Mitt Romney in the state at 47%. He leads Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich each by 4 points, 46-42 and 48-44 respectively. The only Republican he actually runs behind is Rick Santorum, although only by a single point at 47-46. This is the latest in an increasingly long line of our polls recently that challenge the premise that Romney is a much stronger general election candidate than Santorum.

Obama's standing against Romney is greatly improved from November when he trailed by 7 points at 49-42. Part of the reason for that is Obama's own numbers have improved. He has a 46/52 approval rating in the state now where it was 41/54 three months ago. Obama's approval rating with Democrats has increased from 74% to 87% over that time. That's a trend we're seeing nationally- the longer the GOP race gets dragged out, the more Democrats unify around Obama. Obama's also flipped his numbers with independents from negative territory (35/57) to positive (51/46).

Part of Obama's resurgence is his becoming more popular. The other part though is Romney's numbers heading in the wrong direction. He was already unpopular in Arizona the last time we polled with a -13 favorability spread (38/51). Now he's dropped even further to -21 (35/56). Romney's numbers with Republicans are pretty much unchanged. But he's gone from having an unusual number of Democrats seeing him positively (25%) to only 15% who mark him favorably across party lines now. And with independents he's dropped from a bad 32/56 to a worse 24/67. The drawn out nature of this campaign is not helping him for the general.

In the end I doubt Obama would be able to beat Romney in Arizona. He's getting 16% of the Republican vote right now and that seems unlikely to hold once the GOP gets unified around its nominee. But the fact that we're even talking about Arizona as potentially being on the board right now is a big a shift from where we were a couple months ago.

Full results here

Comments

[Graham Murphy]

I will be proudly voting for Barack Obama again. I just worry about the AZ campaign. They've proven to be quite disorganized and disrespectful to their volunteers. I stopped my participation as a phone bank captain because of this.

[RAGGEDT]

Would have liked to have seen if Obama's renaissance was in any way connected to his faceoff with Gov. Jan Brewer. That strikes me as one incident that might have had an unexpected ripple effect in Arizona (beyond the changing economic picture from which Obama appears to be benefiting).

[apetra]

Atrocious methodology.

Your poll has republican supporters of each primary candidate saying the other candidates are "unelectable" against obama.

Democrats fall in love with their candidates, Republicans fall in line. Once there's a nominee, Obama loses in Arizona.

[Minnie Richards]

I certainly hope that those asking the questions tonight, in the GOP debate, will dare to ask questions that will give the public the truth, expose radicalism and will allow ordinary people to make up their minds!So many times the questions that will provide the hard but true answers are avoided and the masses are deceived even though most stay abreast of the real issues and who has the people's best interest at heart!

[Obama 2012]

apetra - possibly... or the GOP will nominate Rick Santorum and he'll end up scaring the bejeesus out every independent voter in the country.

I know PPP polls are showing Santorum doing as well (or better) than Romney in the general election but I'm not buying that he's just as "electable" ... I think it's just a matter of a lot of people not knowing much about him yet.