Poll: GOP voters still not happy with choices
CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.
Overwhelming dissatisfaction with the direction in which our country seems to be heading, and mediocre approval ratings for President Obama, should provide plenty of opportunity for Republican presidential candidates to find traction.
But a new CBS News/New York Times poll suggests the current field have a long way to go to impress the nation's conservative-minded voters.
While Republicans are more enthusiastic than Democrats about the presidential elections in 2012, Republican voters remain entirely un-enthused by their current options -- they're still waiting for one of the field to step up and shine, or for a new face to spring from the shadows.
Only 23 percent of Republican voters said they were satisfied with the candidates running for their party's nomination, while a solid majority of 71 percent said they'd like to see a new face in the mix.
That's in spite of the fact that President Obama's overall approval rating remains at a fairly unimpressive 47 percent - down one percentage point from a poll conducted just three weeks ago - and a consistent majority say they're dissatisfied with his handling of the economy.
Seven percent of self-described Republicans said they were enthusiastic about Mitt Romney's candidacy, and Michele Bachmann, who has stolen the spotlight in recent days, got the same backing. Two percent threw their backing to Herman Cain. None of the other candidates managed to garner more than 1 percent of the Republican respondents' backing.
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This poll was conducted among a random sample of 979 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone June 24-28, 2011. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.