Poll Positions: Majority Wants Obama Fired, GOP Primary Gets Shaken Up, Christie will ‘Discuss His Plans’ This Afternoon

There are so many polls out today it’s hard to know where to start, so let’s start at the top. A majority of President Obama’s board of directors — us — expects to fire him next year.  Our employee has serious performance issues.

A majority of Americans expect Barack Obama to be a one-term president, an assessment on which, in past elections, the public more often has been right than wrong.

Just 37 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll say they expect Obama to win re-election in November 2012; 55 percent instead expect the eventual Republican nominee to win.

Polls like this raise the stakes for the GOP debate next week, and for the primary generally. If trends continue along their current line, the winner of the GOP bracket is likely to win the presidency.One big reason for this is found in a new CBS poll, which finds that a big majority of Americans believe that President Obama hasn’t helped the economy:

Sixty-nine percent say the president has not made real progress on the economy, which voters overwhelmingly cite as their most important issue. Twenty-five percent say he has made real progress.

Perceptions are not improving. The percentage who said Mr. Obama has made real progress has dropped 10 points from a survey 13 months ago, when 35 percent said he had made real progress.

Just 35 percent of Americans approve of Mr. Obama’s handling of the economy, and his approval rating on the issue has been below 40 percent since February.

That in mind, the same WaPo/ABC poll above shows a GOP race that has once again been shaken up. Cain is raising his numbers while the Perry star picks up a few dents.

Among announced candidates — without Christie or Palin in the race — Romney leads with 25 percent, which is identical to his support from a month ago. Perry and Cain are tied for second with 16 percent, numbers representing a 13-point drop for Perry and a 12-point rise for Cain since early September.

And a new Florida poll finds that Romney has jumped back into the lead there, while Perry has fallen into single digits.

 Cain is now running in second place in Florida now that his support surged nearly 19 percentage points after last month’s Republican Party of Florida’s Presidency 5 debate and straw poll, according to a survey of likely Florida voters conducted by Gainesville-based War Room Logistics, which typically polls for Republicans.

Meantime, Perry’s support plummeted nearly 16 percentage points.

Perry had been tied as a Florida frontrunner with Mitt Romney at about 25 percent on Sept. 20, dropped to third/fourth place with 9 percent of the vote where he’s statistically tied with Newt Gingrich (10 percent).

Romney’s support grew a modest 3 percentage points, to 28 percent.

All of this sets things up nicely for next week’s debate at Dartmouth. Perry was in the lead in the last few debates, making him target number one for all of the other candidates. He might get a breather this time around, as Romney is back to frontrunner status and Cain’s rise draws attention. Romney is carrying an awful lot of baggage that has not been explored in any of the previous debates — he’s questionable on gun rights, as governor was weak on sanctuary cities, RomneyCare, his general history of flip-flopping. A campaign of reminding voters that whatever Romney is saying now, he has probably said the exact opposite and it’s all on tape somewhere, could be effective. And, if Chris Christie is in the race, then Romney gets to fight off the nightmare of having another blue state Republican governor crowd his space, bringing his charisma into the battle. Christie is set for a 1 pm Eastern time announcement…today.

Update: Christie is apparently still not running.