full fledged congressional showdown with a tax hike for millions of americans hanging in the balance. i m wolf blitzer. you re in the situation room. this just coming in. our brand new poll numbers hitting pitting president obama against the republican candidate. the survey puts each toe to toe the president and even though the election is still almost 11 months away, the results still troubling for the gop. let s go inside the numbers with ron brownstein of the national journal. thanks very much for coming in. these numbers, hot, they re fresh right now. hypothetical match-ups between the president and the republican challengers out there. look at this. in a hypothetical match-up between president obama and mitt romney. right now, president obama would win 52 to 45%. margin of error, 3%, but he would still win national. those are some of the best numbers we have seen for president obama in any of the head to heads recently. seven points ahead of mitt romney, wider than
handing out bottled water and clean up supplies. ma am, a response i got from a viewer when i talked to you earlier, was the cell phone app that people could download this app and find shelters. red cross shelters. describe that for me again. where they can get it and exactly what it is used for. we have a free application for iphones and ipads. it is a shelter app. you can download it from itunes. it will show you where all of the shelters are that we have open. if you are in a location and you feel you need to get to a shelter, pull up an app and get to safety as soon as possible. that is useful information this morning. we will channel that out to our viewers. kate meier, we appreciate you giving us the update. we hope we can continue to call on you as the storm makes landfall. we are at the bottom of the hour here now. i was not supposed to be here in studio with you this weekend for this newscast. i was supposed to be in washington d.c. we were taking our show on
cnn s jim spellman is seeing its power firsthand. he s now in the bahamas. we ll try to get jim spellman. we don t have him quite yet because the wind is blowing really, really hard in the bahamas at this moment. let s head into atlanta and check in with jack can jeras. can you tell us the track of the storm? we can, carol. we ve seen more changes and it bridges it closer to hugging the coast of the united states, potentially from north carolina all the way on up northward. i do want to tell people, this is just in. normally we get this 20 minutes before the top of the hour and it literally just came in. bear with me. the hurricane watches you ve been talking about, this is the north carolina coast, from north of surfacy to the north carolina/virginia border. tropical storm watches in addition for that north of modesto beach to surfacy. basically what that means is hurricane conditions are expected in about 48 hours, but tropical storm watch means tropical storm conditions
to see how they re doing. a lot of damage. interestingly, jim, one thing to we do e-mailed me this which came from the national emergency management agency hout there where you are. they basically tell us it is the islands where the problems are. a lot of power lines down, a bridge out here and there, a report from cat island that all power lines were down and no telecommunications. so it sounds like the large islands have done pretty well. the smaller islands, either we don t know or they have had some problems. that s right. it s probably going to be another at least into tomorrow where they re able to get a sense. people can only get to those islands it s hard to communicate there. you know the first thing to happen is power is out. they don t even know that they re really facing yet. trying to send out the trucks. really, until tomorrow they can get out there, maybe get some planes out there. it s going to be tough for them to know the real impact on the bahamas.
and the winds picked up as well. police say they are in that location based on a new tip and information that came from a search warrant early on in the investigation. patti ann? patti ann: alicia acuna reporting live. thank you. computer hackers may no longer be content to just steal bank and credit card information. they could be setting your seats their sights on your car. that from security experts who warn that a crafty hacker might be able to unlock a vehicle s doors and even start its engine by sending special text messages to its anti-theft system. no key required and no hot wiring necessary. cars rely more and more on computers with alarms and gps systems increasingly connected to cell phone networks and that could make them more vulnerable to high-tech criminals. there s word a big american bank is about to cut thousands of jobs and that may be just the beginning. a live update straight ahead. also going back to school is getting more expensive in more ways than one.