Voting time...

This weekend we'll do our final polls for 2010. It's been a great year.

One of them will be for North Carolina- if you have any good North Carolina poll question ideas please send them our way.

The other is up for a vote with the finalists that didn't win from last week's poll vote. I'll just paste what we said about each of those states. One thing I should say that I didn't last week- voting 3 or 4 times on different computers is fine. We won't even know you did that. Creating proxies to cast hundreds of votes for a particular state, which I think might have happened with Ohio and Wisconsin last week, is not ok and if someone does that we'll just move on and poll whatever finished second. We like giving the folks who read our blog a voice in what we poll but it's disappointing when people try to really manipulate the vote.

Here are the choices:

-Arizona. This is one of the few states where Obama has any chance of winning one he lost in 2008, and this may be the best opportunity Democrats have for picking up a Senate seat other than Nevada and Massachusetts.

-Florida. We've already polled on Bill Nelson several times looking toward 2012- his approvals aren't great but it's partially because Democrats don't love him that much. He actually has higher than usual appeal to Republicans and independents and as a result has done decently well against the hypothetical opponents we've tested. No harm in taking another look at his prospects though and a first look at how Obama does against named Republicans in the state.

-Nebraska. We already have a pretty good idea that Ben Nelson is in deep, deep trouble but no hurt in getting another set of eyes on it. We can also look at Obama's prospects for winning Omaha again. I'll give up Omaha for Obama if I can have it for UNC's baseball team but I guess it doesn't work that way.

-New Jersey. Tons of polling now makes it clear that Robert Menendez isn't very popular. The question is whether that's 'we don't like you but we'll vote for you over a Republican anyway' unpopularity or if it's 'we don't like you and we're going to put you out of office' unpopularity. Time to put some names up against him.

-Pennsylvania. Potentially close Senate race that we know little about at this point and still one of the biggest Presidential states for sure.

-Texas. A couple questions to ponder here- 1) is this competitive as as an open seat and 2) just how susceptible is Kay Bailey Hutchison to a Tea Party challenge. One thing I'm pretty confident about is Hutchison being invincible in a general election.