President Barack Obama in the Oval Office, July 30, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
“If today were November 6, President Barack Obama would sweep the key swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania and – if history is any guide – into a second term in the Oval Office,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
TAXING THE WEALTHY gets a rousing reaction, putting Pres. Obama in great position as we head into August and await Mitt Romney’s vice presidential pick, which will have little impact on independents or swing voters at the voting booth, unless he comes up with someone surprising and out of the box. No one is expecting this from the patriarch who can’t seem to deviate from the course he’s plotted and stubbornly wedded to no matter what occurs, which is hurling his campaign train off the tracks continually.
President Barack Obama hits the magic 50 percent mark against Gov. Mitt Romney among likely voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with wide support for his plan to hike federal income taxes on upper-income voters, according to a Quinnipiac University/ CBS News/New York Times Swing State Poll released today.
This is the first measure of likely voters in these swing states and cannot be compared with earlier surveys of registered voters. Matching Obama against Romney in each of these key states – no one has won the White House since 1960 without taking at least two of them – shows:
Florida: Obama edges Romney 51- 45 percent;
Ohio: Obama over Romney by a slim 50 – 44 percent;
Pennsylvania: Obama tops Romney 53 – 42 percent.Support for President Obama’s proposal to increase taxes on households making more than $250,000 per year is 58 – 37 percent in Florida, 60 – 37 percent in Ohio and 62 – 34 percent in Pennsylvania, the survey by Quinnipiac/CBS/The Times finds.
And yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, those Bain ads are working. It’s also not helping that Mitt Romney is stonewalling on his tax returns, while his team continues to parrot political language that sounds like WAH-WAH-WAH.
That Pres. Obama has reached the 50% mark is worth noting as well. In lieu of Mitt Romney becoming more transparent, which is very unlikely, because his patriarchal mind set doesn’t think he owes anyone anything, he’s helping Obama. See, he’s the white male gazillionaire on top of the heap, so the information people are getting from Team Obama resonates even more, especially in battleground states. When it comes from a perceived winner about a man who thinks taxing the wealthiest Americans, which includes himself, is unfair, it embeds even further.
Teddy Roosevelt, F.D.R. and John F. Kennedy were from American dynasties, but they also felt the pain of the less fortunate, understanding their role as chief executive included making the game fairer for those not in the privileged class.
Mitt Romney is so far out of this universe as to be in another galaxy and the case Team Obama is making is driving that point home, because the people viewing the ads believe them.
Team Obama has defined Mitt Romney.
But a torrent of television advertising in the states, particularly in Ohio and Florida, appears to be resonating in Mr. Obama’s quest to define his Republican rival. The polls found that more voters say Mr. Romney’s experience was too focused on making profits at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he led, rather than the kind of experience that would help create jobs. – The New York Times
The Romney campaign is going to have to do something to shake up the impression, represented in the 50% threshold in these three battleground states, or he’ll have no way of switching the election to a referendum on Obama’s first term, which is his only chance of winning. It’s not going to happen by the blanket negative ads from Karl Rove, the Koch Bros. and others, because living in one of those battleground states I can tell you that the saturation point has been reached.
A nice touch by Team Obama here in Virginia is while all of the GOP and SUPER Pac ads are harshly negative, every once in a while you’ll see Pres. Obama come on with the ad softly making his case to camera, rebutting the “false” negative ads taking his words out of context. He talks about “the choice” of what this election means. It’s personal, effective, and a welcome respite from what Republicans and Romney’s SUPER Pac friends are doing. As someone experiencing this daily, including throughout hours and hours of Olympic coverage, the contrast is stark, with Pres. Obama coming off much better than Republicans.
And if voters really understood the private equity business model, they would laugh at any claim that Mitt has any idea how to create jobs. When someone made a fortune from
- borrowing huge amount of debt to buy a company
- restructuring that company by laying-off as many people as possible and stealing their pensions (so called ‘creative destruction’)
- saddling the company with huge fees payable to the private equity firm
- using the favorable tax treatment on corporate debt to make so called company look more profitable than it is
- then divesting from the company by making the company incur huge amounts of debt to buy out the shares of the private equity or listing the company
- then hiding these huge profits in off-shore bank accounts,
- and finding all sorts of way to avoid paying taxes for close to 10 years (why give back what you have worked so hard to take)
then that person has NO idea how to create jobs and NO willingness to contribute anything to the country or his community.
That’s the way to make the case, which is resonating strongly in 3 important battleground states.
Mr. Competent is experiencing the summer of his unraveling, with his gafferiffic foreign policy trip now immortalized in a hilarious web ad.
Bingo! Private Equity has nothing to do with job creation!
Should be titled….Please send Mr. Romney in.
if you look at the state polls vs national polling there is a clear trend in the red states Romney is outperforming McCain but in the Obama states Obama still has comfortable but smaller leads.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map_no_toss_ups.html
In Real Politics state breakdown Obama is a landslide electoral winner. Even if Romney were somehow to win Ohio, Florida and Virginia he would still fall short of winning the electoral college vote.
Romney will have to draw to an inside straight to have any chance of winning the electoral college vote
those polls are satisfying. however,i think the jobs numbers come out this friday. another poor or negative number would be trouble. and when it comes to the ‘echo-chamber’, repubs dominate.