by Evie Stone

Good day, everyone.

It's a poll-tastic Wednesday morning in our nation's capital, and despite yesterday's feisty back & forth on Iraq and Afghanistan, it appears that voters are most concerned about the economy. An NPR/Kaiser/Harvard poll in the crucial swing states of Florida and Ohio finds that more than 7 out of 10 voters call the economy a top issue. And get this:

[M]ore than three-quarters of people in Florida said they were facing at least one serious economic problem; half said they were struggling with three or more. The big ones? It's jobs, gas prices, housing and health care.

A second wave of data from the national poll from the Washington Post and ABC News (we wrote about the first wave yesterday) echoes those findings, with about half of voters ranking economic concerns at the top of their list, followed by gas/energy prices, and Iraq in third place.

Meanwhile, a New York Times/CBS News poll finds that despite Barack Obama's groundbreaking candidacy, many African-Americans say they have seen little progress on race relations in the past few years. The poll also indicates racial divisions in the perception of Obama as a candidate:

Black voters were far more likely than whites to say that Mr. Obama cares about the needs and problems of people like them, and more likely to describe him as patriotic. Whites were more likely than blacks to say that Mr. Obama says what he thinks people want to hear, rather than what he truly believes. And about half of black voters said race relations would improve in an Obama administration, compared with 29 percent of whites.

Those findings are...not terribly surprising. But according to ABC's Jake Tapper, the Obama campaign is already pushing back.

Georgia held its state & local primaries yesterday, and despite yesterday's WP article about a younger generation of black politicians challenging incumbents with civil rights-era cred, longtime Democratic Rep. John Lewis cruised to an easy victory in his first contested primary since 1992.

Coming up today: for all you Veep watchers out there, Barack Obama appears in Indiana today alongside Sen. Evan Bayh and former Sen. Sam Nunn — two names that have been bandied about by VP speculators. And John McCain addresses the NAACP. Not an altogether common stop for a GOP candidate, and maybe especially tricky today given the timing of the NYT poll. He's expected to focus on education.

And finally, JibJab has a new video portraying Barack Obama bounding over hill and dale on a pink unicorn, surrounded by woodland creatures, as John McCain rips out an IV and hops into a tank.