dimanche 4 novembre 2012

Obama Back On Top in Popular Vote, Does Romney Still Have a Chance?

Latest Presidential Election Polls 2012 & Electoral College Map:


By I-Hsien Sherwood | i.sherwood@latinospost.com | First Posted: Nov 02, 2012 05:54 PM EDT
(Photo : Reuters) U.S. President Barack Obama participates in a campaign rally in Hilliard, Ohio, November 2, 2012.
Republican challenger Mitt Romney's lead in the national polls has ended.
It has now been five days since any major poll has shown Romney ahead. Several put Romney and President Obama in a tie, but that it a much-improved situation for Obama, who had been trailing by up to 7 points in recent weeks.
To be sure, the Gallup daily tracking poll, which showed the largest leads for Romney, has been suspended in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
But the IBD/TIPP poll has also been suspended, and that one regularly showed leads for Obama, even when most other polls did not.
The Rasmussen daily tracking poll, which has continued despite the destruction from Sandy, shows the candidates tied, at 48 percent even.
A Fox News poll from earlier in the week finds the same result.
But both a CBS News/New York Times poll and an ABC News/Washington Post poll show Obama leading by a point, a remarkable turnaround in the last week of the campaign.
RealClearPolitics, which aggregates national polls to give a single average of all available data, now gives Obama a 0.3 percent lead in the popular vote, undoing the lead Romney has had for most of the last month.
The prediction market Intrade, which allows betting on future events, including the presidential race, gives Obama slightly less than 2 in 3 odds to win the election.
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight pegs Obama's chances at 81 percent, though he bases his prediction on the Electoral College count, which actually determines the winner of the election.
While Obama was behind in national polls, it appeared as though there might be a split between the Electoral College and the popular vote, which has only happened four times in American history, though it occurred as recently as 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost Florida and the Electoral College to George W. Bush.
Now the national polls and swing state surveys are coming back into line with each other, and not in the way Romney had hoped.
No matter his efforts in boosting his numbers nationwide, it is the swing states that will decide this election, and there he is faltering.
Obama is up in Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire and, most dangerously for Romney, in Ohio, whose 18 electoral votes makes the difference between a win and a loss for either candidate in most of the likely Electoral College scenarios.
Romney is pouring his resources into Ohio in these last desperate days, but Obama is doing the same.

Who will win Election 2012? How Obama hopes to get re-elected

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Photographer: Getty Images
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Posted: 11/02/2012Last Updated: 6 hours and 42 minutes ago
  • By: Associated Press By: Associated Press
WASHINGTON - For President Barack Obama, winning re-election rests on a workman-like, get-out-the-vote strategy aimed at protecting key territory in the Midwest, ramping up minority turnout, and building early voting leads that could protect against a late surge by Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
It's a far cry from the lofty rhetoric and gauzy closing arguments that defined Obama's final push in 2008. And it's a reflection of a race that remains tight in its final days, and an outcome that could hinge on little more than battleground state turnout.
"We have two jobs: One, persuade the undecideds, and two, to turn our voters out," said Jim Messina, Obama's data-driven campaign manager.
Obama himself has gotten deeply involved in those efforts. He made a personal appeal to 9,000 undecided voters on a conference call from Air Force One, promoted early voting by casting his own ballot before Election Day, and offered encouragement to staff and volunteers during numerous stops to battleground state campaign offices.
"I hate to put the burden of the entire world on you, but basically it's all up to you," Obama told volunteers this week in Orlando, Fla. His comments were meant to be light-hearted, but they spoke to the degree to which his campaign is counting on its massive ground game to carry Obama to re-election.
The campaign relied heavily on that operation this week when Superstorm Sandy forced Obama off the campaign trail and back to Washington for three days to oversee the federal response. The Democratic get-out-the-vote effort kept churning, allowing Obama to project presidential leadership and offer comfort in a crisis -- intangibles his campaign knows could be beneficial in persuading late-breaking voters.
They helped him win over at least one person: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent, who said Obama's handling of the storm was key to his decision to endorse the president.
Obama, in his final appeal to voters, is trying to burnish his bipartisan credentials, seeking to convince voters he's the same man who burst into the political spotlight eschewing the notion of red states or blue states.
Polls show Obama and Romney tied nationally. But the president's advisers say the map of competitive states tilts in their favor. The president started the race with more pathways than Romney for reaching the required 270 Electoral College votes, and aides say all of those options are still within reach. Romney's campaign, on the other hand, is still grappling for a clear roadmap to 270.
Nine states are up for grabs: Ohio, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado and Nevada.
Key to Obama's electoral strategy is protecting a Midwestern firewall: Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin, a three-state combination that would put him over the necessary threshold. The president will visit those states multiple times in the campaign's final stretch, including four straight days of travel to Ohio.
Obama can win without Ohio. But if he does carry the state's 18 electoral votes, it would make Romney's path to victory far more difficult, requiring the Republican to win nearly every other competitive state or pull off upsets in traditionally Democratic states.
Private polling from both parties has Obama leading Romney in Ohio, where the president's bailout of the auto industry is popular. And more Democrats than Republicans in the state have cast their votes early.
Romney's campaign is looking to expand the battleground map by making a late play for a trio of left-leaning states: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Minnesota. That's forced Obama's team to buy television advertising time in states where it had hoped to avoid spending money.
Obama aides insist the campaign is not in trouble in those states and aides say there are no plans for Obama or Vice President Joe Biden to travel there in the campaign's closing days. Instead, they say their strong fundraising efforts have given them the financial means to defend against Romney's criticism wherever he decides to run ads.
But aides say voter turnout, not ads, will determine the election. Obama's team has put particular emphasis on ramping up turnout during early voting periods, especially among "sporadic" voters who may be less likely to go to the polls on Election Day.
The efforts appear to be working. Democrats have an edge in votes cast in Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio. Republicans have an advantage in Colorado.
Obama's campaign says boosting early vote totals could put key states out of reach for Romney even before Election Day. In Ohio, for example, Obama aides estimate the Republican would need to carry at least 53 percent of the vote cast there on Tuesday in order to remain in contention.
It's more than just party registration that has Obama's team feeling confident. It touts data showing two-thirds of those who have already voted were women, young people, blacks and Hispanics. Obama is almost certain to win the majority of those voting blocs.
Aides say minority voting in particular is on track to reach an all-time high, perhaps as high as 28 percent of all voters.

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