Heard on NPR the big movement in Hispanic vote in FL towards Dems is from non-Cuban Hispanics moving into FL in recent years, outnumbering the Cold Warring/BombCuba Cubans.
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Heard on NPR the big movement in Hispanic vote in FL towards Dems is from non-Cuban Hispanics moving into FL in recent years, outnumbering the Cold Warring/BombCuba Cubans.
Romney to pledge to fix troubled U.S. immigration system
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will pledge to Hispanics on Monday that if elected he will fix the troubled U.S. immigration system in an appeal to a rising voter bloc that overwhelmingly favors Democratic President Barack Obama.
The last serious attempt at an immigration overhaul, made by Republican President George W. Bush in 2007, collapsed in Congress as conservatives rebelled against the plan, which they called an amnesty for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already living in the United States.
After promising during his 2008 campaign to take on the immigration issue, Obama never followed through, leading to disappointment among various Hispanic groups.
Romney will point to Obama's inability to work on the problem as a failure.
"Candidate Obama said that one of his highest priorities would be to fix immigration in his first year in office. Despite his party having majorities in both houses of Congress, the president never even offered up a bill," Romney will say.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/...88C17C20120917
Hey, Mr Gecko, did ja know? a majority in the Senate is Constitutionally sufficient, but the Senate has gridlocked itself by ignoring the Constitution's 51 and requiring 60, which Barry NEVER had.
Room temperature <> ambient outdoor temperatureQuote:
Originally Posted by Wild Cobra
The vast majority of Arizonians have an AC or at least a swamp cooler.
In other words, he lost to the groups that have increased wisdom with aging...Quote:
Originally Posted by BradLohaus
Here's the Michael Moore video I was talking about. The part I mentioned starts around 3:30 or so. If he's right, and I don't doubt that he is, then that is just an amazing statistic. Obama won big and quickly; it was over very early that night. But if only people over 30 voted he would have lost. You would think this would be well known, but this is the first I've heard of it. Probably not a stat the democrats would want the public to be too aware of. The delayed adulthood of today has to be common knowledge across the country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE13hHvbS7w
Anyway, Romney has to carry so much that McCain lost. Ohio, Florida, Virgina, and North Carolina... just to be in the race. The shifting demographics might be hitting faster then even the most pessimistic conservative thought just a few years ago. It's not just race; the vast majority of Republican women are married. Ever more female never married/divorced/single moms means more liberal women, who will raise more liberal never married/divorced/single moms.
The Democrats know these votes are theirs; the right has no chance of getting a significant share of them anywhere near its current form. All of the demographic changes that have taken place and will continue to take place favor the left. The dominant coalition of non-whites, single women and the young that's been inevitable for a while in presidential elections may already be here.
How to Solve the Swing-State Puzzle
If you don't follow the polls every day, just follow the money. For example, as of Sept. 6, according to National Journal, the campaigns and outside groups spent a combined $330 million on advertising in states carried by George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. In states that were carried by Democrats in those elections, like Michigan, they've spent one-tenth as much. This implies that Obama will get a better result than his party did in those years. On the other hand, the lack of appreciable expenditures in Arizona, Missouri or Georgia, which John McCain carried in 2008, indicates that Obama is not actively trying to expand his map, either.
The most plausible range of outcomes runs from Obama losing the election by about two percentage points, slightly better than John Kerry did, to his winning it by perhaps six or seven, slightly worse than his margin from four years ago. Given where the election is being contested, however, the most likely outcome is that Obama wins enough tipping-point states to eke out a victory.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/23...uzzle.xml?f=19
could be an ephemeral post-convention sugar high, but the enthusiasm gap favors the Dems in this USA Today poll of likely voters:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politic...oll/57803524/1Quote:
There is one front on which the Democrats have scored clear and perhaps crucial gains. The "enthusiasm gap" that favored Republicans by 11 points a year ago suddenly has moved to a 9-point advantage for Democrats — a crucial asset when it comes to turning out supporters to the polls.
The percentage of Democrats who say they are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting has surged from 53% last month to 73% now. Republican enthusiasm has risen but by not nearly as much, to 64% from 55%.
Those gains in enthusiasm might reflect the effectiveness of the conventions in boosting base supporters: 16% of Democrats but just 6% of Republicans said the political conventions had "a great deal" of impact on their vote.
lots of "Christian" voters aren't enthusiastic about a hard-core Mormon
lots of "conservatives" aren't enthusiastic about, don't trust Gecko because of his moderate stances as MA gov and installing "socialisitic" MA health care. recruiting hard-ass, kill-govt, (bogus) deficit hawk Ryan was supposed to give Gecko conservative cred,then Ryan starts repeating that he doesn't set policy, Gecko does. :lol
Gecko's only hopes are still his 1%er's/UCA/Wall St war chest and scorched-earth disenfranchisement of Dem voters in swing states.
In Repug/Rick Scott's Wisconsin, Gecko is struggling
Wisconsin Offers Window Into Challenges Facing Romney
Seven weeks until the election, with Mr. Romney facing new questions about his ability to gain trust among voters experiencing economic hardships, his campaign is increasingly pointing to Wisconsin as a place where a statewide Republican resurgence could rub off on Mr. Romney.
But President Obama has overtaken Mr. Romney on who would do a better job handling the economy, according to a new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll of likely Wisconsin voters. The poll also found that Mr. Obama has a 17-point edge over Mr. Romney when voters are asked if a candidate cares about their needs and problems.
As the president makes his first campaign visit of the year to Wisconsin on Saturday, the poll found that Mr. Obama was the choice of 51 percent to 45 percent for Mr. Romney among likely voters. The six-point lead, which includes those who said they were leaning in one direction or another, marks a slight shift in Mr. Obama's direction since Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin joined the Republican ticket last month.
The findings of the poll, along with the fallout from newly exposed remarks Mr. Romney made at a fund-raiser in which he bluntly suggested that 47 percent of Americans saw themselves as victims who are dependent on the government, offer a window into the challenges confronting his campaign here and other important swing states during the final 48 days of the race.
Rob Jankowski, an independent voter who supported Mr. Obama four years ago but has been disappointed by his economic leadership and disapproves of his health care plan, is among the 3 percent of voters in the survey who say they are still undecided. He said he did not feel loyalty to Mr. Obama simply because he supported him last time, but he said Mr. Romney had not made his case.
"Obama is putting out his plans and his details and being more public on that, but with Romney it's kind of gray,"
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/19...2856DCDBE?f=19
The Repugs can't win legitimately, so it's the Rove hate, lie, slander machine plus:
Looking, Very Closely, for Voter Fraud
It might as well be Harry Potter's invisible Knight Bus, because no one can prove it exists.
The bus has been repeatedly cited by True the Vote, a national group focused on voter fraud. Catherine Engelbrecht, the group's leader, told a gathering in July about buses carrying dozens of voters showing up at polling places during the recent Wisconsin recall election.
"Magically, all of them needed to register and vote at the same time," Ms. Engelbrecht said. "Do you think maybe they registered falsely under false pretenses? Probably so."
Weeks later, another True the Vote representative told a meeting of conservative women about a bus seen at a San Diego polling place in 2010 offloading people "who did not appear to be from this country."
Officials in both San Diego and Wisconsin said they had no evidence that the buses were real. "It's so stealthy that no one is ever able to get a picture and no one is able to get a license plate," said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin agency that oversees elections. In some versions the bus is from an Indian reservation; in others it is full of voters from Chicago or Detroit. "Pick your minority group," he said.
The buses are part of the election fraud gospel according to True the Vote, which is mobilizing a small army of volunteers to combat what it sees as a force out to subvert elections. Ms. Engelbrecht's July speech in Montana was titled "Voter Fraud: The Plot to Undermine American Democracy."
True the Vote's plan is to scrutinize the validity of voter registration rolls and voters who appear at the polls. Among those in their cross hairs: noncitizens who are registered to vote, those without proper identification, others who may be registered twice, and dead people. In Ohio and Indiana, True the Vote recently filed lawsuits to force officials to clean up voter rolls.
Efforts to tighten voter requirements have become a major issue in the presidential election. Over the last few years, many states have passed voter identification laws, and many of those are being challenged in court.
Now, a network of conservative groups is waging an aggressive campaign on the ground. In a report this month, the liberal-leaning organizations Common Cause and Demos cited True the Vote as the central player in this effort, which it called a threat to the fundamental right to vote.
"It is not about party or politics; it is about principle," Ms. Engelbrecht said.
While she portrays True the Vote as nonpartisan, it grew out of a Tea Party group, King Street Patriots, that she founded in Texas. An examination shows that it has worked closely with a variety of well-financed organizations, many unabashed in their desire to defeat President Obama.
A polished and provocative video, circulating among Tea Party activists, seeks to raise a "cavalry" to march on swing states and identifies True the Vote as a participant in the effort, called Code Red USA.
In the past year, Americans for Prosperity, an organization founded by the billionaire Koch brothers, and other Republican-leaning independent groups have sponsored meetings featuring Ms. Engelbrecht and other True the Vote speakers. A spokesman for Americans for Prosperity said that the group had hosted events including True the Vote speakers but that election integrity was not a focus of his group.
Election integrity has become a focus for other activists, including James E. O'Keefe III, a video producer known for his undercover stings of the now defunct community organizing group Acorn. He recently aimed his camera on North Carolina voters in what turned out to be a botched attempt to show that foreigners had registered.
Voter registration has occupied a contentious corner of American history for decades. The perception that voting is ripe for fraud stems in part from the condition of voter rolls in many jurisdictions. The Pew Center on the States issued a report in February finding that more than 1.8 million dead people remained on voter rolls and that about 2.8 million people were registered in more than one state. Another 12 million registrations contained flawed addresses, it said.
Even so, there have been few cases of widespread fraud, according to the Justice Department. A bipartisan commission in 2005 found little evidence of extensive fraud, even while recommending the use of voter identification.
While there have been some recent criminal cases involving local elections, the Justice Department said in a statement that the record has not shown that significant "voter impersonation fraud - the type of fraud that many states claim their voter ID laws are aimed to prevent - actually exists."
But Ms. Engelbrecht said, "Anyone who tells you that election integrity efforts are a solution looking for a problem is way misinformed."
True the Vote is now using proprietary software to accelerate the process of challenging voter registrations. It says its databases will ultimately contain all voter rolls in the country. Using computers, volunteers can check those rolls against driver's license records, property records and other databases, turning the process into an assembly line production.
But when True the Vote vetted petition signatures in Wisconsin's recall election, the state's Government Accountability Board reported that the process was "at best flawed." The group raised questions about thousands of signatures that the board deemed valid.
Roots of a Cause
Ms. Engelbrecht, who at 42 is younger than most of the Tea Party members she addresses around the country, said that until four years ago she was apolitical, a churchgoing mother of two who ran a successful oil field machinery business with her husband in Fort Bend County, Tex.
"Then in 2008, I don't know, something clicked," she said. "I saw our country headed in a direction that, for whatever reason - it didn't hit me until 2008 - this really threatens the future of our children."
The epiphany prompted Ms. Engelbrecht to work as a poll watcher in the 2009 local elections along with others in the King Street Patriots, the Tea Party group she founded. It was supposed to be a one-day assignment, but it crystallized the concerns of Ms. Engelbrecht and her fellow volunteers, who said they saw shenanigans including outright fraud. The group felt duty bound to continue its activities.
In Houston, the group targeted the Congressional district represented by Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat who is black. Ms. Engelbrecht said the group settled on Ms. Lee's district because thousands of addresses there housed six or more registered voters, which it took as an indication of inaccurate registrations. The methodology, which the group still uses, could disproportionately affect lower income families.
Volunteers spent five months analyzing 3,800 registrations in Ms. Lee's district, discovering more than 500 voters that the group said were problematic. More than 200 voters were registered at vacant lots, prompting Ms. Engelbrecht to later remark that those voters had a "Lord of the Rings Middle Earth sort of thing going on."
The reality was far less interesting.
"They had one particular case I remember very well," said Douglas Ray, the Harris County assistant attorney who represents the election registrar. "They had identified an address where eight or 10 people were registered to vote. There was no building there." Mr. Ray found out that the building had been torn down and that the people simply moved.
As a result of the organization's work in 2010, 400 to 500 voters were put on "suspense," forcing them to provide additional information verifying their addresses. By the fall 2010 election, volunteers again appeared to focus on minority neighborhoods, this time as election observers, Mr. Ray said.
"The first day of early voting, at many of the 37 locations, primarily in minority neighborhoods, dozens of poll watchers showed up sent by King Street Patriots," Mr. Ray said.
The influx of white election observers in black neighborhoods caused friction with voters and poll workers, bringing back memories of a time when racial intimidation at the polls was commonplace in the South, said Gerald M. Birnberg, a lawyer and former chairman of the Harris County Democratic Party. True the Vote has strongly denied that it has engaged in voter suppression.
"Whether that was the intention or just born of some innate paranoia is largely irrelevant," Mr. Birnberg said. "That's how it was perceived by people at the polls."
Working in Wisconsin
The boiling political caldron of Wisconsin was the next stop for True the Vote. It teamed up with two Tea Party organizations to review nearly one million signatures on petitions demanding the recall of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. The partnership called itself Verify the Recall.
"We have been hearing reports of duplicate signatures, questionable practices and downright fraud in the gubernatorial recall effort," Verify the Recall said in a pitch to volunteers. "The integrity of Wisconsin's elections and associated processes are at stake; free and honest elections - the cornerstone of our political process - are being threatened."
True the Vote began working in Wisconsin in 2011, the same year it received a $35,000 grant from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which is based in Wisconsin and is a major backer of conservative causes, including Americans for Prosperity. The foundation's president and chief executive, Michael Grebe, was Mr. Walker's campaign chairman for his 2010 campaign and for the recall election, which he won.
Mr. Grebe said in an interview that the grant was for activities unrelated to the recall. He said the donation was ultimately returned because it was given on the premise that True the Vote would be granted tax-exempt status by the I.R.S., which Ms. Engelbrecht said has not happened despite several attempts.
Ms. Engelbrecht has said her goal was not to stop the recall election, which had been backed by labor unions, but to prove to those behind it "that unions cannot strong-arm America." She said thousands of volunteers helped enter petition signatures into a database, which was then analyzed by the group's software. Of the one million signatures, True the Vote said 63,038 were ineligible, 212,628 required further investigation and 584,489 were valid.
The accountability board concluded that about 900,000 signatures were valid and, in a memorandum reviewing True the Vote's work, criticized its methods.
For example: Mary Lee Smith signed her name Mary L. Smith and was deemed ineligible by the group.
Signatures deemed "out of state" included 13 from Milwaukee and three from Madison.
The group's software would not recognize abbreviations, so Wisconsin addresses like Stevens Point were flagged if "Pt." was used on the petition.
Signatures were struck for lack of a ZIP code.
While the board commended the group for encouraging "a strong level of civic engagement," it found that True the Vote's results "were significantly less accurate, complete and reliable than the review and analysis completed by the G.A.B."
On Election Day, poll watchers appeared to have slowed voting to a crawl at Lawrence University in Appleton, where some students were attempting to register and vote on the same day.
Charlene Peterson, the city clerk in Appleton, said three election observers, including one from True the Vote, were so disruptive that she gave them two warnings.
"They were making challenges of certain kinds and just kind of in physical contact with some of the poll workers, leaning over them, checking and looking," said John Lepinski, a poll watcher and former Democratic Party chairman for Outagamie County.
He said that as a result of the scrutiny, the line to register moved slowly. Finally, he said, some students gave up and left.
Ms. Engelbrecht said the True the Vote observer at Lawrence University believed that students were being permitted to register and vote without proper identification.
In Racine, conservative poll watchers also alleged fraud, including a claim that a busload of union members from Michigan had come to Wisconsin to vote illegally. The Racine County Sheriff's Department determined that the accusation had been based on an anonymous call to a radio station.
"There is no evidence this bus convoy existed or ever arrived in Racine County," the Sheriff's Office said.
As for the buses her organization saw in Wisconsin, Ms. Engelbrecht could not provide details. "It was reported to us that this had occurred," she said. "I know these sightings were also being reported on the radio."
The Code Red Cavalry
Driving down the Interstate in Florida, you may see an R.V. wrapped with a picture of Abraham Lincoln.
These eye-catching vehicles are mobile command centers for registering and energizing voters. They are part of a citizen effort to "defeat Obama, hold the House and win the Senate in November," Fred Solomon, a retired Alabama businessman, said in an e-mail to fellow Tea Party supporters.
Mr. Solomon is a coordinator for Code Red USA, the plan to flood swing states with conservative volunteers. "Partnering with True the Vote, a nonprofit, nonpartisan watchdog group, we will train and put election observers in polling places in the swing states to reduce voter fraud," Mr. Solomon said in his e-mail.
Code Red USA is financed by the Madison Project, a political action committee whose chairman is former Representative Jim Ryun, a Kansas Republican who was regarded as among the most conservative members of Congress. The provocative video promoting Code Red accuses Democrats of "a clear intent to commit massive voter fraud."
Despite Mr. Solomon's e-mail and the video, which identifies True the Vote as a participant, Ms. Engelbrecht said her group has no role in the effort.
Nevertheless, Mr. Solomon and many other conservative activists have followed Ms. Engelbrecht's lead.
Mr. Solomon said he was a volunteer poll watcher in Wisconsin and is concerned that voter fraud is rampant around the country. "We just don't understand why dead people are voting," he said.
Finding that someone voted in the name of a dead person is the holy grail of the voter integrity movement, said Jay DeLancy, a retired Air Force officer in North Carolina who embraced the cause after attending a True the Vote meeting last year. Mr. DeLancy, who runs the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, said the group recently submitted the names of 30,000 people who he said were dead yet remained on voter rolls in the state.
Earlier this year, he challenged more than 500 registered voters who he said were not American citizens. After reviewing the challenges, election officials refuted most of them, but confirmed that three were noncitizens who had registered improperly. One had voted.
Mr. DeLancy said he was convinced that the elections agency overlooked many noncitizen voters.
"They want me to look stupid and to look like I'm wasting taxpayer money," Mr. DeLancy said.
He said he split from True the Vote partly because the group raised concerns about focusing on immigrants. "They're not wanting to be branded some kind of anti-immigrant activist group," Mr. DeLancy said.
Mr. DeLancy said he made challenges after comparing voting rolls with citizenship information in jury duty records.
The strategy was used by Mr. O'Keefe, who is known for undercover video stings. Shortly after the North Carolina primary in May, Mr. O'Keefe posted a video aimed at proving noncitizens were registered to vote.
A narrator says: "William Romero is registered to vote in North Carolina. Here is a copy of his voter registration form, where it says he was born in Colombia, South America. He is not, however, a United States citizen."
The video cuts to a young man, dressed in green lederhosen, walking into Mr. Romero's polling place and giving Mr. Romero's name and address. When he is asked to sign his name certifying that he is William Romero, the man, whose right hand was bandaged, says he is unable to sign and leaves.
The video later shows what appears to be the same man in green lederhosen impersonating a registered voter named Zbigniew Gorzkowski.
Not only were Mr. Romero and Mr. Gorzkowski citizens, but the State Board of Elections concluded that Mr. O'Keefe's operatives may have broken several laws, and turned over evidence to prosecutors. "Further, the videos made false or unfounded allegations that only hurt the elections process," North Carolina election officials said in a report.
Mr. O'Keefe, who did not respond to requests for an interview, is on probation for unlawfully entering a federal building in New Orleans in an aborted sting targeting Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana.
Mr. Romero could not be reached for comment. Mr. Gorzkowski, a naturalized United States citizen who operates a deli in North Carolina, said the video was extremely embarrassing, especially after a Polish newspaper ran an article suggesting that he was at the center of a voting scandal in the United States.
'Never Had Any Problem'
Late last month, Ms. Engelbrecht was in Columbus, Ohio, for a True the Vote workshop. About 90 people signed up for the event at a suburban Holiday Inn, where they listened to speeches and discussed how to challenge questionable voters, including 51,000 "nonexistent" people in just one county that True the Vote's Ohio volunteers say are registered to vote.
During the meeting, Anita MonCrief, True the Vote's senior adviser, unleashed her vitriol at what she said was a coalition of voter registration groups, accusing them of "doing voter fraud since at least the early '90s," she said.
"And these groups target minority areas. Why? Because it's so much easier to go work in those areas where they say people have been forgotten or they don't have a voice. Then, when anybody pays a little bit of attention to the fact that there's a high level of fraud coming out of the African-American communities, they say: 'Oh, you're a racist. You don't want black people to vote,' " said Ms. MonCrief, who is black. "Vote fraud deniers is what I call them."
After the event, the volunteers, known as the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, submitted challenges of 380 registered voters in Hamilton County, which includes Cincinnati. One of the voters, Teresa Sharp, received a notice from her local Board of Elections stating that her family's right to vote had been challenged and ordering her to attend a hearing on Sept. 10.
"I've always voted," said Ms. Sharp, who had even been a poll worker. "Never had any problem."
At the hearing, she said she asked, "Why are you all harassing me?" She said she believed it was because "either they don't want Obama in there or the fact that I'm black."
Amy Searcy, the director of the Hamilton County Board of Elections, said there was no discernible racial pattern in the challenges. Of the 380 challenges, about 35 voters will have to prove that their addresses are current if they appear at the polls. A vast majority of the objections were thrown out.
In the case of Ms. Sharp, a representative of the Ohio Voter Integrity Project withdrew the challenge and apologized to the family.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/17...fraud.xml?f=77
massive voter registration fraud, AND massive fraudulent voters.
NO EVIDENCE, ANYWHERE, EVER. BUT IT MUST BE STOPPED! :lol
Some Repug states, cities have even made voter registration drives ILLEGAL.
Repugs' America is Truly Beautiful.
Mark McKinnon on Why Time Is Running Out for Mitt Romney
Ex-Bush aide Mark McKinnon keeps waiting for Romney to turn his campaign around and show the right stuff. After the 47 percent tape, he’s not sure that moment will ever come.
Well, the release of the Romney tape was a moment that certainly revealed something about him. But not what I was hoping for. Just the opposite. It reveals a deeply cynical man, who sees the country as completely divided, as two completely different sets of people, and who would likely govern in a way that would only further divide us.
Now I honestly don’t know what Romney can do to win support from the voters he needs to gain a majority. I thought the debates would be an opportunity, but he has dug his hole so deeply now, I don’t know if he can pull himself out.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...=Cheat%20Sheet
Jeffress: Vote For Perry Because Romney Is Not A True Christian
Following his endorsement and introduction of Rick Perry at the Values Voter Summit, Robert Jeffress went on Focal Point with Bryan Fischer to chastise Romney's Mormon faith, arguing that he is not a "true, born again follower of Christ." He said that only Perry can defeat "the most pro-homosexual, most pro-abortion president in history."
"It is not Christianity, it is not a branch of Christianity," Jeffress said, "It is a cult." Jeffress went on to explain that many evangelical Christians will not vote for Romney because he is a Mormon and therefore not "indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God." He even claimed that Romney's Mormon faith "speaks to the integrity issue" as it explains why he has reversed his position on abortion rights, among other issues.
Incidentally, Bryan Fischer will be speaking immediately after Romney at the summit and has claimed that Mormons do not have rights under the First Amendment. As we have previously noted, this is not the first time Jeffress has attacked the Mormon faith and Mitt Romney for his religion, saying Mormons "worship a false god."
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/conten...true-christian
In 2012, Gecko didn't speak, but Ryan did
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/conten...er-summit-2012
in 15 or 20 yrs? You mean when the generations that have been disenfranchised by the GOP grow up and have voting rights?Quote:
Originally Posted by mavs>spurs
Just because they are Catholic doesn't mean they will vote Republican. There are very conservative Cubans-Americans I know that would rather not vote at all than vote republican.
Something Big Is Shifting in the Electorate -- Obama Has Moved Over 50 Percent Line in Three Vital Swing States
President Obama has pulled ahead in the swing states of Colorado, Iowa and Wisconsin, according to a new poll by released Friday morning by the Wall Street Journal/ NBC News/Marist College, “reaching the 50 percent threshold in all three battlegrounds.”
The WSJ/NBC/Marist poll finds that Obama is up by 5 percentage points over Romney in Iowa and Colorado, and up by 8 percentage points in Iowa. This fits the overall pattern in polling this week where the nation’s electorate is shifting toward Obama after seeing how and he and Romney responded to the attack on the American embassy in Libya on 9/11, and heard Romney’s harsh remarks about “47 percent” of Americans failing to pay federal income taxes and being overly dependent on federal benefits.
What’s particularly striking about the shift toward Obama is not just that poll after poll has found that Romney is too distant from voters—whereas Obama is more concerned and likeable, but as was found in the WSJ/NBC Colorado results, that likely voters there have slightly more confidence in Obama on the economy than Romney, and much more confidence in Obama on foreign policy.
http://www.alternet.org/hot-news-vie...ne-three-vital
Willard still fucked. He better hope Obama comes out of the closet or gets caught in a bed with a high school boy or a goat because right now that's the only chance Romney has of winning.
It would take the goat. The age of consent in DC is 16 years, so it wouldn't matter to the left.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jacob1983
Yep and you're right. Most Americans don't care if two guys get in bed and do their thing. However, if someone is screwing a goat or an animal then people are like "WTF".
Polls Show Obama Is Widening His Lead in Ohio and Florida
COLUMBUS, Ohio - For weeks, Republicans in Ohio have been watching with worry that the state's vital 18 electoral votes were trending away from Mitt Romney. The anxiety has been similar in Florida, where Republicans are concerned that President Obama is gaining the upper hand in the fight for the state's 29 electoral votes.
Those fears are affirmed in the findings of the latest Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News polls of likely voters in both states, which show that Mr. Obama has widened his lead over Mr. Romney and is outperforming him on nearly every major campaign issue, even though about half said they were disappointed in Mr. Obama's presidency.
But Mr. Romney is facing mounting hurdles in these two critical states, which hold nearly as many electoral votes as the rest of the swing states combined. Mr. Romney's lead among older Americans has shifted toward an advantage for Mr. Obama; his competitiveness with Mr. Obama on who would better handle the economy has dipped into slightly negative territory; more view Mr. Romney unfavorably than favorably - the opposite is true for the president - and majorities say Mr. Romney does not care about the problems of people like them.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/26...orida.xml?f=19
Poll: Romney Ahead in Presidential Race, Say Replacement Refs
G.O.P. Presidential nominee Mitt Romney finally got some good news today as he found himself ahead of President Obama in a poll of N.F.L. replacement referees.
The survey, which immediately lifted the spirits of the Romney campaign, was taken among replacement refs on the field during N.F.L. games that they were supposed to be officiating last Sunday and Monday.
According to the poll, if the election were held today the replacement refs would have Mr. Romney beating President Obama by a score of 14-12.
By a wide majority, the replacement refs “strongly agreed” with the statement, “I’m pretty sure I’m right about this but I need to talk it over with some other people first.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...#ixzz27b6w0puN
:lol Acting like old voters are somehow wise instead of just being old, ageist, selfish pricksQuote:
Originally Posted by Wild Cobra
The "old white people" voting bloc only cares about three things: securing their handouts, eliminating all other handouts, and making sure young people get no benefits but still pay down the debt their elders ran up for them, tbh.... they only buy the rest of the neocon crap to validate their deeply-held prejudices and religious beliefs, tbh....
6 Ways Mitt Romney's Getting His Butt Kicked
1. The Polls
Conspiracy theories about “skewed” polls aside, Obama maintained a very small but persistent lead throughout most of the spring and summer, and since the conventions, he has opened up a significant lead, especially in the crucial battleground states that decide the election.
The Gallup daily tracking poll has Obama up by 6 points nationwide, and TPM's average of all recent polls has him up by just under 5 points.
But the real story is in the swing states. A Washington Post poll out yesterday found Romney trailing in Ohio by 8 points and by 4 points in Florida – without which, Romney has a very tough map. According to TPM's averages, Obama also enjoys leads in Virginia (4 points), Colorado (3 points), Pennsylvania (8 points), Iowa (4 points), Nevada (5 points), Paul Ryan's home state of Wisconsin (8 points), New Mexico (9 points), Romney's home state of Michigan (11 points) and a razor-thin lead in New Hampshire. The only “swing state” Romney leads is North Carolina – Mitt's up by a a third of one percent there in the average, but Obama's led in the 4 most recent polls.
According to New York Times polling guru Nate Silver, if the election were held today, Obama would have a 96.4 percent chance of victory.
2. The Money Race
It wasn't supposed to be this way, but the Obama campaign crushed Team Romney in August fundraising, setting a new record for the month with $85 million dollars to Romney's $66 million.
That's just the campaign's coffers, however. The Republican National Committee has raised a lot more than its Democratic counterparts. And then there are the outside groups.
But what we're seeing is that having control of the cash means something. Romney doesn't dictate how the RNC or these SuperPacs spend their loot, and the result has been a less targeted effort.
As far as ad spending, Paul Blumenthal notes a huge disparity:
The campaign committee might be raking in large numbers, but it has questionably refused to spend big money on advertising. Romney's campaign spent a total of $66 million in August -- the same amount it took in -- with only $18.4 million going to media buys and production. The advertising budget for the Obama campaign nearly equaled the entire Romney August budget, with $65 million put forward for television.
This advertising disparity is nothing new. Since Romney became the presumptive nominee in May, the Obama camp has dumped tens of millions every month into advertising to define the Republican candidate before he could define himself. In total, including August's numbers, the Obama campaign has outspent Romney on advertising by nearly 600 percent -- $171.4 million to just $30.3 million.
3. People Don't Like Mitt Romney
It's been a persistent finding all year: Obama enjoys a higher favorability rating than job approval – some of the people who don't think he's done a good job still like him personally. He had a ten point net favorability rating in the latest Pew poll.
For Mitt, the story is quite different. As Pew Research noted, Romney is the first candidate since 1988, for either major party, to be saddled with a negative net favorability rating in September.
http://www.alternet.org/files/styles..._territory.png
4. The Issues
Remember them? The story for most of the summer leading up to the conventions was that the American people preferred Obama to Romney on most issues, save the most important one: handling the economy. That's what was keeping the race close.
But Obama's post-convention surge happened as – or because – he pulled ahead of Romney on the economy. According to the latest Washington Post poll:
Fifty percent of all voters say they trust the president more to deal with the economy; 43 percent say so of his Republican challenger... The president also holds a big lead over his rival on who is trusted to advance the interests of the middle class.
That means that Obama now leads on not only key character traits, but every issue the pollsters ask about, except for whom voters trust more to reduce the deficit. Here's the scorecard from Pew's September 19 survey:
5. Coattails
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Obama was not the only politician to emerge from the convention with a gust of wind in his sails. Democrats' newfound enthusiasm seems to be having an impact on down-ballot races. On August 26, the day before the RNC began, Nate Silver gave Democrats a 50-50 chance of holding the Senate. In the month since, their chances of holding the upper chamber have increased to 83 percent.
According to The Hill, Republican strategists are concerned about the top of the ticket dragging down their party’s chances:
Republican strategists say that Romney has had a rough stretch recently and warn it could cost the party Senate seats if his execution fails to improve by November.
“Every year the top of the ticket has a great influence on the races below. Massachusetts is a very competitive race, and we have a great candidate in Scott Brown. If Obama wins overwhelmingly, it’s a lot more difficult for Scott Brown to get reelected,” said John Weaver, a senior adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2000 and 2008 presidential bids.
“If your guy wins the White House, he’s going to sweep in one or two or three Senate races that might not happen otherwise,” he added.
The ongoing Mittastrophe also has a number of GOP candidates for the House squirming.
6. Enthusiasm
The rise in Obama's polls following the conventions is almost entirely a result of disenchanted Democrats coming back into the fold and getting fired up for the general election. For much of the race, the GOP had counted on an “enthusiasm” gap in their favor, but that appears to have reversed itself.
In the latest Washington Post poll, 94 percent of Obama supporters were somewhat or very enthusiastic about voting in November, while just 6 percent were unenthusiastic. 86 percent of Romney voters were similarly fired up, while 13 percent said they were “not so enthusiastic” or “not enthusiastic at all.”
75 percent of Obama supporters said they were voting for the president, while 22 percent were voting against Romney. It's a very different picture for the Republican: only 45 percent of Romney supporters say they're voting for him, while half say they're voting against Obama.
Losing Older Voters
It should come as surprise to nobody that Romney's selection of Paul Ryan – and embrace of his plan to end Medicare as we know it – isn't playing well with older voters.
It's wrong to say Romney's losing among this group – he holds a 4-point lead among voters over 60 in the latest Reuters/ Ipsos poll. But the trend is not looking good for the Republican ticket, as Reuters noted earlier this week:
New polling by Reuters/Ipsos indicates that during the past two weeks - since just after the Democratic National Convention - support for Romney among Americans age 60 and older has crumbled, from a 20-point lead over Democratic President Barack Obama to less than 4 points.
Romney's double-digit advantages among older voters on the issues of healthcare and Medicare - the nation's health insurance program for those over 65 and the disabled - also have evaporated, and Obama has begun to build an advantage in both areas.
http://www.alternet.org/election-201...ked?paging=off
thats a huge alternet vortex
If Repug voters are obviously outnumbered, then cheat, kill the Dem voters.
Tea party groups work to remove names from Ohio voter rolls
The groups and their allies describe it as a citizen movement to prevent ballot fraud, although the Republican secretary of state said in an interview that he knew of no evidence that any more than a handful of illegal votes had been cast in Ohio in the last few presidential elections.
"We're all about election integrity :lol :lol :lol — making sure everyone who votes is registered and qualified voters," said Mary Siegel, one of the leaders of the Ohio effort.
Some Democrats see it as a targeted vote-suppression drive. The names selected for purging include hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008.
The battle over who belongs on the voter rolls in Ohio comes as supporters of Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, are making elaborate plans to monitor the polls and mount legal challenges after the Nov. 6 election if necessary.
Obama's reelection campaign and Romney allies are already fighting in court over Republican efforts to block Ohio voters from casting ballots the weekend before the election. In 2008, Ohio's final weekend of early voting drew tens of thousands of African Americans to cast ballots, mainly for Obama.
The racial dimension of the 2012 clash over weekend voting burst into the open last month when one of Ohio's most powerful Republicans, Franklin County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse, told the Columbus Dispatch, "We shouldn't contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African American — voter-turnout machine."
Some Democrats see the developments in Ohio as part of a national drive by Obama's opponents to minimize turnout of his supporters, one that includes efforts elsewhere to impose new voter ID rules.
"Too much of this is going on for this not to be a coordinated effort," said Tim Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party in the tea party stronghold of southwestern Ohio.
The Rev. Rousseau A. O'Neal, one of a group of black ministers from Cincinnati who provided buses to take African Americans to the polls in 2008 and plan to do so again in November, described the tea party project and the curtailment of weekend voting as "bigotry of the highest order."
http://mobile.latimes.com/p.p?m=b&a=...%3D0%26DPL%3D3
FL the same, trying to steal the WH like it did in 2000
Florida Officially Restarts Voter Purge, Revised List Still Appears To Be Inaccurate
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/...2/09/scott.jpg
Florida has officially restarted it’s controversial purge of registered voters less than 6 weeks before election day. Governor Scott’s intention to resume the effort, detailed in a PowerPoint presentation, was first reported by ThinkProgress.
Initially, Florida identified 180,000 potential non-citizens to be purged from the voter rolls. That list was subsequently narrowed down to 2600 “sure fire” non-citizens. When it became clear in early June that even the smaller list was riddled with errors, elections officials stopped the effort.
According to the Miami Herald, Florida has sent just 198 names to local election supervisors. (Of those, no more than 36 have ever cast a ballot.) But there is already evidence that the latest list still is not accurate.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...be-inaccurate/
Ryan Budget a Loser in Swing States
A series of internal polls conducted by the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA found that voters in key swing states hold sharply negative views of Paul Ryan’s budget — which is to say, the budget to which Mitt Romney irrevocably lashed his presidential aspirations when he picked Ryan as his vice-presidential nominee.
Priorities USA asked between 600 and 800 respondents in the states: “Based on what you have seen, read or heard about it, do you support or oppose the budget plan proposed by Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, also known as ‘the Ryan Budget’?”
In all cases, the polls, shared with Salon before their public release, found the budget plan’s popularity to be underwater by close to 10 points.
http://www.alternet.org/election-201...r-swing-states
Repug Pres candidate selects VEEP running mate who helps destroy his campaign! :lol
2008 all over again.