COULD THIS BE? – AT 7:28 P.M. ET:  There's a new poll out that can be placed in the category of "answered prayers" for Republicans.  From Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:

No, this is not coming from Rasmussen or an internal GOP poll, but from the normally Democrat-sympathetic Public Policy Polling. PPP pitted Barack Obama against five potential Republican challengers for the 2012 presidential campaign, and the only one Obama beat was … Jan Brewer. Even that, PPP admitted, resulted from Brewer’s lack of name recognition. The headline, though, is Sarah Palin’s dead heat with the President:

He trails Mitt Romney 46-43, Mike Huckabee 47-45, Newt Gingrich 46-45, and is even tied with Sarah Palin at 46. The only person tested he leads is Jan Brewer, who doesn’t have particularly high name recognition on the national level at this point

The news is almost uniformly bad for Obama in the poll. His approval rating is now seriously underwater at 45/52. That gets even worse among independents, 40/56. He doesn’t get above 46% in any matchup with Republicans, not even Jan Brewer, whom he beats 44/36, with 20% undecided.

We caution that other polls haven't produced news quite that depressing for the president, but PPP is indeed a tilt-toward-Dems organization.

It's pretty clear that Sarah Palin is considering a run for the top job.  If there are more polls like this, she might just take the plunge.  I don't know whether that would be good or bad for the GOP, but it would certainly be interesting.

We'd want some verification of these results from other surveys to come.

July 15, 2010