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Source: USA TODAY/Gallup Poll of Swing States taken Oct. 5-11 in Colo., Fla., Iowa, Mich., Nev., N.H., N.M., N.C., Ohio, Pa., Va. and Wis. Margins of error: +/- 4 to 6 percentage points. Nationwide head-to-head matchup based on Gallup daily tracking poll of registered voters Oct. 10-11. Margin of error: +/- 4 points.Kevin A. Kepple and Susan Page, USA TODAY |
USA Today — Mitt Romney leads President Obama by five percentage points among likely voters in the nation's top battlegrounds, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, and he has growing enthusiasm among women to thank.
As the presidential campaign heads into its final weeks, the survey of voters in 12 crucial swing states finds female voters much more engaged in the election and increasingly concerned about the deficit and debt issues that favor Romney. The Republican nominee now ties the president among women who are likely voters, 48%-48%, while he leads by 12 points among men.
The battle for women, which was apparent in the speakers spotlighted at both political conventions this summer, is likely to help define messages the candidates deliver at the presidential debate Tuesday night and in the TV ads they air during the final 21 days of the campaign. As a group, women tend to start paying attention to election contests later and remain more open to persuasion by the candidates and their ads.
That makes women, especially blue-collar "waitress moms" whose families have been hard-hit by the nation's economic woes, the quintessential swing voters in 2012's close race.
"In every poll, we've seen a major surge among women in favorability for Romney" since his strong performance in the first debate, veteran Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says. "Women went into the debate actively disliking Romney, and they came out thinking he might understand their lives and might be able to get something done for them."
While Lake believes Obama retains an edge among women voters, the changed views of Romney could be "a precursor to movement" to the Republican candidate, she says. "It opens them up to take a second look, and that's the danger for Obama."
Female voters are a critical part of the president's coalition. Four years ago, he led Republican rival John McCain by a single point among men, according to surveys of voters as they left polling places. The decisive Democratic margin of victory came from women, who supported Obama by 13 points.
Now, the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows Romney leading Obama 51%-46% among likely voters in the swing states. Men who are likely voters back him 54%-42%. The states are Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Romney pollster Neil Newhouse says the poll shows "encouraging movement" in the wake of the first debate in Denver. Obama pollster Joel Benenson calls the method used to identify likely voters flawed.
"In the last election, Gallup's registered voter model — not its likely voter model — was a much more accurate predictor, with their likely model missing the mark in 2010 by 9 points right before the election," Benenson says. "That explains why Gallup's results are way out of line with a dozen recent swing state polls that show the president with a double-digit lead among women."
Among all registered voters in the survey, Obama leads by nine points among women and by two points overall, 49%-47%.
The poll of 1,023 registered voters, including 869 likely voters, was taken Oct. 5-11 — just after the first presidential debate and before the second one in Hempstead, N.Y. It is the 10th in USA TODAY's series of surveys in the swing states that, in the Electoral College system, are likely to determine the outcome. For the first time, with Election Day looming, the poll includes a screen to identify likely voters.
Romney's improved standing among female voters is "likely to cause major consternation among Obama supporters," says Richard Eichenberg, a Tufts University political scientist who is studying gender differences in state-level polling with Elizabeth Robinson. "If Mr. Romney has tied President Obama among women in swing states, then he has likely taken a step toward winning the election.
"But a word of caution is necessary," Eichenberg adds. "Although swing states share many similarities, President Obama's support among women is holding up well in some of them and less well in others. For example, his support among women is largely unchanged since the first debate in Ohio and Wisconsin, but it is definitely down in Colorado, Virginia and Florida." {Read More}
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The New York Times - Mitt Romney continues to surge in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, and Friday may have featured his best set of polls all year.
The best way to track a change in the polls is to look for instances in which the same firm has surveyed the same state (or the national race) multiple times. The FiveThirtyEight forecast model relies on a procedure very much like this to calculate the overall trend in the race.
Fifteen polls were released on Friday that provided a comparison with another survey conducted between the Democratic convention and last week’s debate in Denver. Mr. Romney gained an average of 4.6 percentage points in these surveys.
That is actually a bit larger than we were showing earlier in the week, when the same exercise put Mr. Romney’s postdebate bounce more in the range of three or four percentage points.
It is not clear whether Mr. Romney is still gaining ground — or whether he benefited from a couple of outlying results. The median change in the polls, which will be less sensitive to potential outliers, was a three-point gain for Mr. Romney, more like earlier in the week.
But unlike earlier, Mr. Romney is now seeing some of his best results in swing state polls. Six of the seven polls published on Friday from such states had him ahead.
Thus, just as the hypothesis of a fading Romney bounce was damaged on Friday, so was the idea (which we critiqued in an earlier post) that his gains would be more modest in the swing states. {Continue Reading For More Analysis}
Thomas Peterffy grew up in socialist Hungary. Despite the fact that he could not speak English when he immigrated to the United States in 1956, Thomas fulfilled the American dream. With hard work and dedication, he started a business that today employs thousands of people. In the 1970s, Thomas bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange. He played a key role in developing the electronic trading of securities and is the founder of Interactive Brokers, an online discount brokerage firm with offices all over the world.
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WSJ - So now we know what Team Obama's comeback plan was following last week's defeat in the Presidential debate. Unleash Joe Biden to interrupt, filibuster, snarl, smirk and otherwise show contempt for Paul Ryan. The carnival act contributed to the least illuminating presidential or vice presidential debate of our lifetimes.
From the opening bell, Mr. Biden seemed to take to heart the interpretation that President Obama offered this week of his debate performance—that he had been "too polite." That was not a problem for the Veep, whose marching orders were clearly to steamroll the overmatched moderator Martha Raddatz and dismiss everything Mr. Ryan said with a condescending sneer.
By unofficial media counts, Mr. Biden interrupted the Republican some 80 to 100 times. Mr. Ryan let the bully get away with too much for our tastes, at least until he finally pushed back on the interruptions or until Mr. Biden lost steam in the last half hour. But as anyone who's been in a tavern past midnight understands, it's hard to win a fight with a guy who is shouting from the corner bar stool.
No doubt the performance cheered Democrats who needed cheering after last week, but we wonder how well it played with independents or undecided voters who tuned in to learn something.
To the extent that substance mattered, and it didn't count for much, Mr. Biden had his strongest notes on foreign policy. He too glibly rolled past the murders of four Americans at the Benghazi consulate a month ago, attributing the Administration's false early explanations to "the intelligence community." We doubt that's what the investigation will ultimately show. But on Afghanistan, Syria and to a lesser extent Iran, Mr. Biden was more sure-footed than Mr. Ryan. On Syria in particular, Mr. Ryan never said what a Romney Administration would do differently.
Mr. Ryan was stronger on domestic issues, calmly laying out the facts of Mitt Romney's proposals on taxes, Medicare and job creation. Even here, though, the debate devolved into an exchange between Mr. Ryan's policy details and Mr. Biden's free-association appeals to emotion and class solidarity—"Who do you trust on this?" {Read More}
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The Washington Post - The final weeks of the presidential campaign are bringing Mitt Romney full circle, back to a question that has tugged at him for nearly two decades: What does he really believe?
Although he declared himself “severely conservative” during the Republican primaries, the former Massachusetts governor has been sounding more moderate in recent days.
There may be room for argument as to whether Romney’s positions are changing. But the emphasis and tone with which he describes them unquestionably are — on issues that include immigration, taxes, education and health care.
On Tuesday, the candidate, who has repeatedly vowed that he would be “a pro-life president,” told the Des Moines Register editorial board that “there’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.”
In an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, President Obama said the comment was “another example of Governor Romney hiding positions he’s been campaigning on for a year and a half.”
What remains to be seen is which Romney will be judged as the real one by voters. Will they consider his flexibility disturbing evidence that he lacks principles or a reassuring signal that he would not govern as an ideologue?
At a rally in Las Vegas, former president Bill Clinton mocked Romney’s shifts, saying they were evident in last week’s presidential debate, which was almost universally regarded as a win for the Republican.
“I had a different reaction to that first debate than a lot of people did,” he said, laying it on with his buttery Arkansas drawl. “I thought: ‘Wow, here’s old moderate Mitt. Where ya been, boy? I miss you all these last two years.’ ” {Read More}... Click here for the video.
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ABC News - ABC News has learned that Eric Nordstrom, the former Regional Security Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Libya, has told congressional investigators that security at the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, was “inappropriately low” – and believed that State Department officials stood in the way of his attempts to change that.
Nordstrom and the commander of a 16-member Security Support Team, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, heard that foreign fighters were flowing across the Egyptian border and were making their way across the border to the Libyan city of Derna – which is to the east of Benghazi — and from there were making their way to Benghazi. But State Department officials seemed oblivious to their Benghazi post’s vulnerability.
Nordstrom was worried -he did not know how much the Americans could rely on members of a local Libyan militia in Benghazi that provided security — the “17th of February Martyrs Brigade.” Mostly merchants and shopkeepers before the war, they seemed eager, but they hadn’t much experience and other than a daily $30 stipend for food from the U.S. Embassy, they hadn’t been paid in months.
Nordstrom had “no idea if they would respond to an attack,” he told investigators.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, led by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., will hold hearings on what went wrong today at noon ET. Nordstrom will testify at that hearing.
Nordstrom twice wrote to the State Department – in March and July 2012 — to beef up the presence of American security officers in Benghazi, but neither time was there a response. At no point from December 2011 through July 2012, when he left Libya, were more than three Diplomatic Security Service agents permanently and simultaneously stationed at the Benghazi post. {Read More}
Rice and White House officials now say those initial accounts were based on early intelligence, since corrected. State Department officials now call the attack unprecedented given the number of gunman, weapons and lethal force used.
