If the latest polls have you biting your fingernails, I have something to cheer you up. The Rocky Mountain Poll has both president and the Democrats’ senate candidate up in Arizona.
After trailing Mitt Romney by as much as eight points in the days immediately following the Presidential debate, the President is now in a statistical tie with Romney in Arizona both as regards the overall electorate and among those mostly likely to cast ballots. While Obama leads Romney by two points in the race for President, the gap is within the study’s margin of error and basically means they are in a dead heat.
In the U.S. Senate race, Democrat Richard Carmona has a four point lead over Republican Jeff Flake, which again indicates a dead even race, since the vote gap is within the margin of error of the survey. Thus it must be concluded that Arizona is definitely a battleground state for both the Presidential and the U.S. Senate races and there can be little doubt but that the outcome will be largely dependent on which political party does the best job in turning out its voters and whether the Democrats can hang onto the Latino vote.
Hey, I am just trying to keep you sane. Do you need more good news? How about this from Pubic Policy Polling?
PPP’s newest Ohio poll finds Barack Obama leading 51-46, a 5 point lead not too different from our last poll two weeks ago when he led 49-45.
The key finding on this poll may be how the early voters are breaking out. 19% of people say they’ve already cast their ballots and they report having voted for Obama by a 76-24 margin. Romney has a 51-45 advantage with those who haven’t voted yet, but the numbers make it clear that he already has a lot of ground to make up in the final three weeks before the election.
We’ve found a major improvement in Mitt Romney’s image in most of the states that we’ve polled since the Presidential debate, but Ohio is an exception. His favorability now is a 45/51 spread, showing no improvement from his 45/49 breakdown two weeks ago. Obama meanwhile has seen a small spike in his approval rating, from 48/49 to 50/48.
No wonder the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio has been doing everything he can to discourage early voting.
I put this in a previous post, but it works well for the upbeat nature of this thread. Springsteen is joining the campaign trail in Ohio. Looks like he and Clinton both will be doing events.
Also seeing upticks in 538 and RAND charts. It appears that the best Romney can do is a tie. Alas, a tie will probably go to Romney given that the Dems still haven’t shown the fight necessary to win a Florida 2000. So we need an Obama bounce starting this week.
A national tie does not necessarily mean there will be any statewide ties.
True, but it’s likely.
I am not going to kid you, I HAVE been freaking out. After a visit to 538 yesterday I almost had a stroke.
nalbar
BTW,
20% have already voted in Ohio? And they broke 75 for Obama? That’s amazing. I like that.
nalbar
Half serious: their is a 50-50 chance that the SCOTUS will vote 5-4 that NO early voting is allowed in Ohio, all votes have to be discarded, and that anyone who already voted is not allowed to revote. On the grounds that the 14th amendment guarantees Romney the right to the presumption of being a victor.
I know, not real, right? Anyone want to tell me that the justification for their decision in Bush v. Gore was any better than that?
That moment is seared into my political consciousness, like the speech of LBJ in which he says he will not seek re-election, and the speech of Nixon where he resigns. I hope Sandra Day O’Conner is having a horrible retirement.
Ha! I love this. I was just casting about the internet and thinking I needed some good news, when a voice said: Check the booman (which I hadn’t done since this morning) — and yes! Here it is. Something to make me smile.
I also sent along a check this morning. Would it be bad karma to make a connection?
Anyway, yes, we need to keep on working hard. 24 days!
Interesting article on Stephanie Cutter:
http://nyti.ms/QyQH46
Amazing how many of the better strategic decisions of the Obama campaign have been made by her.
Not freaking out here.
I saw both of these polls earlier and even read the whole AZ report because the headline for it was a shocker – the good kind. The early voting advantage for Obama in Ohio does not surprise me because that is what OFA was designed to produce. Glad to see it’s working so well in Ohio.
Here in Nevada, early voting starts on the 20th and the OFA machine should get those votes in early. He’s polling good enough to win it. I wish I could say the same for Shelly Berkley. She can not win if Obama doesn’t sufficiently demoralize the R’s and fire up the D’s to the point where the fence-sitters decide that they want to sit the the Dem-cool-kidz table instead of with the R-sore-loserz table.
But watch the state-by-state polling as it comes in now. I really believe Uncle Joe’s debate performance stopped the bleeding and re-lit the fire for the D’s. Now it’s up to Obama to wow us again and demonstrate that he actually wants to keep his job because even I have been doubting that lately. If he can also manage to leave Romney looking as pathetic as Biden made Ryan look, he could fire up the vote for D’s and make Romney look toxic to the fence-sitters.
He does not have to dominate Romney, but he does need to call out the bullshit, not look passive, and take control. That will be a challenge, since a town-hall format requires interaction with the public and interaction with the opponent. It’s difficult to call the other fellow out strongly in such an environment.
Obama must at least tie in this debate, and close out with a strong performance in the foreign policy debate. I hope that he does call Romney out for “giving aid and comfort of the enemies of the United States of America”, which Romney has been doing.
Disagree slightly. A draw — objectively even not just a draw result as spun by the GOP spin machine and MSM — keeps Romney close and makes the final tally a possible win for the forces of evil. Or at least keeps it close enough for them to steal.
O needs to land some blows, and more than Romney. There’s so much for him to work with though, so this should not require heavy lifting on his part.
And let’s skip the excuse making for O re the format. There’s plenty of room for Obama to score again and again by making crisp, assertive and bold points attacking Romney while addressing an audience questioner. But he needs to cut out the “uh”ing and pausing which dilute his message and cause viewers’ attention to wander, and he needs to make more bite-sized points which everyone can understand, points which sting Romney for his Etch A Sketch positions and which then pivot to what he’s done or proposes.
Dems need to see a fighter in Obama, not a carefully nuanced policy wonk or perfesser. No excuses, but maybe a little bit of drama.
After watching CNN insist on spinning the Biden/Ryan debate as a draw, I think it’s probably more important for Obama to impress the media than the actual voters. Their opinions seem to carry the most weight.
I know the questions will be by audidence members, but I was under the understanding that Candy Crowley would choose which questions to answer.
Crowley is notoriously soft on Romney & GOP, as is much of CNN, so I fully expect her to choose questions which would be softball question for Romney, but harder edged questions for POTUS, especially now since so much of the RWNJ are protestig Raddertz “asserting herself too much” in the debate.
The flip side of that is that Crowley SHOULD have something to prove if she wants to be considered again for moderator. So maybe she will actually be fair, but everything I’ve seen from her so far doesn’t make it seem like that will happen.
“they report having voted for Obama by a 76-24 margin”
…Doesn’t mean they will be tabulated and reported that way.
I just watched the (VP debate) opening to SNL. Funny stuff. My favorite bit from it as best I could transcribe it:
Now they put the video up.
Link
Sunday chats filled with commentary, like that from Nate Silver, that for an hour after the next debate there should be pictures of happy pandas or something but no pundit chatter that ends up ‘telling’ the audience what to think on who won. Well, that would be nice. Chris Hayes joined in saying he’s going to stay off Twitter.