News-Record.com

Public Policy Polling put out its latest survey of likely voters this morning. From the release:

Raleigh, N.C. - Barack Obama slid into third place among Democratic presidential candidates according to the Public Policy Polling’s latest primary tracking poll, leaving John Edwards and Hillary Clinton ahead of the field with 29% each. Last month, the top three candidates were in a statistical tie among likely Democratic primary voters.

Fred Thompson kept his lead among Republicans with the support of 30% of
respondents. He was followed by Rudy Giuliani (20%), Mitt Romney (12%) and a
sinking John McCain (7%).

Perhaps the most notable change was Lieutenant Governor Beverly Perdue reestablishing
a double digit lead (38-28%) over State Treasurer Richard Moore in the Democratic
gubernatorial race. The race had stagnated in previous months with Perdue holding a
four percent lead.

The horse-race stuff is nice, but I what caught my eye this morning was the issue gap between Democrats and Republicans. Dems put the War in Iraq down as the most important issue to them (48%), followed in a distant second by the economy and jobs.

Republicans, too, put the War in Iraq the most pressing issue they saw (34%), but it wasn't so far out front. A relatively close second was immigration. The economy and jobs was way down their list.

This was a pattern that I think we saw in the last election. GOP voters have seized on immigration as an issue and their candidates are happy to talk about it. The problem is, the issue so far hasn't caught on in the Democratic ranks. So Republicans are stuck talking up border security to keep their base happy but it doesn't win over any Democrats, which they need to do in order to win statewide office.

That's got to be quite the conundrum for the Republican gubernatorial contenders, who still all trail undecided by a wide margin. Meanwhile, a third of Democrats say they are still undecided in the race for governor.