Fueled by voter dissatisfaction with President Barack Obama’s administration and the economy, Republican Roy Blunt leads Democrat Robin Carnahan in the highly charged Missouri race for U.S. Senate, according to a Post-Dispatch/KMOV-TV (Channel 4) poll.

The poll, conducted July 19-21, asked voters if they would support Blunt, a congressman from Springfield, or Carnahan, Missouri’s secretary of state. Blunt was backed by 48 percent of the respondents, compared to 42 percent for Carnahan. The remaining 10 percent were undecided.

The two are expected to sail through their party primaries on Aug. 3 and face off in the general election in November.

“Outside of the metro areas, he’s killing her,” said Brad Coker, managing director of Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, the firm that conducted the poll.

Carnahan leads in the more populated St. Louis and Kansas City areas, which tend to vote Democratic. But Blunt leads every other region of the state by a healthy margin, the poll found. In the Republican hotbed of southwest Missouri, where Blunt lives, the seven-term congressman leads nearly 3 to 1.

Pollsters conducted telephone interviews at random with 625 registered Missouri voters who said they cast ballots regularly in state elections. The poll has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Coker pointed to the unpopularity of Obama, especially among independents, as a key reason Blunt is faring better with Missouri voters. Blunt has made tying Carnahan to Obama a staple of his campaign. While the poll was in the field, he was running a television ad highlighting Obama’s recent appearance at a Carnahan fundraiser.

In the poll, 57 percent of respondents disapproved of Obama’s performance as president, compared to 34 percent who approved. Among independent voters — those who didn’t identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans — 63 percent disapproved of Obama’s performance.

Obama, who narrowly lost Missouri in the 2008 election, now has “horrible” numbers in the state, Coker said, especially compared to the rest of the U.S.

A CNN poll taken the same week as the Post-Dispatch poll, for instance, had 50 percent of national respondents disapproving of Obama’s job performance and 47 percent approving. A Fox News poll a week earlier had the president’s disapproval rating at 48 percent.

Coker said it’s possible that Blunt’s television ad skewed the Missouri results somewhat, but he said the overall unfavorable ratings voters gave to Obama — and Carnahan’s lack of strength with independent voters — were stronger factors.

The poll found that the top issue on voters’ minds was the economy. Government spending and health care came in second and third. Those issues simply don’t line up well for Democrats this year, Coker said.

“The voters are on the Republican side on all three issues,” he said.

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