This week's finalists...

We have our monthly national poll in the field this weekend as well as one for Tennessee that we'll have out next week. Time to vote for where we'll go next weekend and your choices are:

-Connecticut. I think this one is about to set a record for consecutive times being included as one of the choices without ever winning but certainly with the open seat situation we'll be interested in taking a look there eventually.

-Hawaii. As I said last week I don't think Linda Lingle left office all that popular so I don't think she'd be a particularly great threat to Daniel Akaka but we're more than happy to take a look at it if you want us to.

-Maine. I've been holding off on giving this as an option while waiting to see if even a 'medium' name would challenge Olympia Snowe from the right- I don't know that there's really the possibility of a 'big name-' but with today's announcement I think we probably have whoever we're going to have at this point so we can at least get a measure of where it starts out. My guess is that Snowe's ahead of named challengers at this point because they're so obscure but that hardly means she's out of the water.

-New Hampshire. One of the closer Presidential states we haven't taken a look at yet and I guess we can tell you for the forty millionth time that Mitt Romney's in the 30s and no one else is out of the 10s for the Republican primary, although I guess if we finally found a story different than that it would be noteworthy.

-Rhode Island. There's really only one thing interesting here and that's to see if Don Carcieri would be competitive with Sheldon Whitehouse. I'm guessing nyet.

-Washington. As we've said before, if we poll this one, we're only going to do President and Senate. I think Maria Cantwell is probably the most potentially vulnerable of the Democratic Senators we haven't polled on yet but that's mostly just because we have polled on almost all of them already. Hard to imagine that if Patty Murray survived 2010 that Maria Cantwell wouldn't survive 2012.

Voting is open until Monday night. As always, don't stuff the ballot box. If the candidate field really starts to become clear in Virginia and/or Arizona over the next couple weeks we'll consider going ahead and polling one of those places but otherwise I think we're going to wait until March before polling any state for the second time.