Nate Silver looks at the polling average in Ohio — made up of roughly a dozen polling firms who have surveyed the state over the past 10 days — and notes it shows President Obama with a 2.4 percentage point lead over Mitt Romney.

“There are no precedents in the database for a candidate losing with a two- or three-point lead in a state when the polling volume was that rich… It is misinformed to refer to Ohio as a toss-up. Mr. Obama is the favorite there, and because of Ohio’s central position in the Electoral College, he is therefore the overall favorite in the election.”

“This isn’t the politically correct thing to say, but when we drove the mother out of the home into the workplace and replaced her with the television set, that was not a good thing.”

— Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), quoted by the Washington Post.

The New York Times ranks the 28 presidential terms since 1900 on the performance of the Dow Jones industrial average — the only major stock index with a history that long — during each presidential term, and on what happened in the election that followed it.

“When the Dow has risen more than 5 percent a year, the incumbent party has retained the White House in 11 elections and lost it in only three elections. When the market fell, or rose at a rate slower than 5 percent, the incumbent party has lost the White House in eight of 13 elections.”

Sheldon Adelson, “among those whose contributions are disclosed, is far and away the largest donor to independent political efforts in both the 2012 election and in any single election in modern history,” the Huffington Post reports.

“The casino billionaire, along with members of his family, has given $54.44 million to super PACs to help elect a variety of Republican candidates, from Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on down to a House of Representatives race in New Jersey.”

“They’re the ideas of countries people come here to get away from.”

— Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), characterizing President Obama’s plans for a second term at a rally introducing Mitt Romney.

David Frum looks at the possibility of recounts, provisional ballots, and a potential electoral college tie: “Please, God, no.”

Greg Sargent runs through the latest polling averages and finds President Obama leading in Ohio, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Iowa while Mitt Romney leads in Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. The race is essentially tied in Colorado and New Hampshire.

“For the sake of argument, let’s give the tied states to Romney. Here’s the basic state of things: If you give Romney all the states where he is leading or tied in the averages — Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, New Hampshire — he is still short of 270. Meanwhile, if you give Obama just the states where he leads in the averages, he wins reelection.”

The Week looks at whether Romney’s “momentum” is actually an illusion conjured by his campaign.

With a new poll showing him just two points behind in Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Rep. Todd Akin (R) released a blistering new ad accusing Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) of corruption.

[Read more…]

While President Obama’s average lead in Ohio is just 2.3 points, Mitt Romney doesn’t lead in a single poll. In Nevada, Obama’s edge is 2.5 points and Romney has led in just one poll this entire year. In Wisconsin, Romney trails by just 2.3 points but hasn’t led in a single poll since August.

Harry Enten notes that “in only one in 150 of the state contests in the last three presidential elections was there an instance of a candidate winning a state where he didn’t hold the edge in at least a single poll in the closing weeks of the campaign.”

President Obama’s campaign put out a new ad with HBO star Lena Dunham implicitly comparing voting to sex.

The Week says Obama critics aren’t amused.

[Read more…]

The conservative Super PAC that had already plowed $2 million into Rep. Joe Walsh’s (R-IL) re-election race and had threatened to put in an additional $2.5 million to “bury” Tammy Duckworth (D), is now putting its money elsewhere, the Chicago Sun Times reports.

“The decision comes a week after Walsh, already a flame thrower, made national headlines by declaring that abortion was never necessary to save the life of a mother. In an atypical move, he held a news conference the next day to clarify his remarks.”

A new Chicago Tribune/WGN poll finds Duckworth leading by 10 points, 50% to 40%.

Walter Shapiro: “The dirty secret of campaign journalism for the next 11 days is that
there is no way for conscientious reporters to give readers what they
crave most of all–advance knowledge of who is going to win the election.
We have reached the point in the campaign when the polls are too close
and the dictates of spin too intense for anyone but a fool (or a TV
pundit) to offer anything more than tentative guesses about who is going
to be inaugurated on January 20.”

“When I was younger–and cockier about divining the future–I was convinced
that if you had the right sources within a campaign, you could figure
out the gist of their internal polling by their off-the-record mood and
body language. So I was privy to the buoyant mood at the upper levels of
the John Kerry campaign during the final heady week of the 2004
campaign. Sometimes in politics, though, the most potent spin comes from
the lies that campaign strategists tell themselves as they interpret
ambiguous information.”

President Obama is out with a new closing ad in several key swing states this morning, including Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Virginia.

The spot asks voters to remember when it’s “just you” in the voting booth what Mitt Romney’s policies will mean.

[Read more…]

A new Mason-Dixon poll in Missouri finds Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) with a narrow lead over Rep. Todd Akin (R) in the U.S. Senate race, 45% to 43%.

Akin is benefiting from McCaskill’s “seemingly intractable favorability rating, one of the few constants in a race of dizzying changes this year. The poll found that while McCaskill has a much higher favorable rating than Akin does — at 40%, to his 28% — she also has the higher unfavorable rating, at 47% to his 42%.”

Update: McCaskill reponds releasing an internal poll showing her with a huge, 52% to 39% lead. National Journal suggests one reason to believe this poll is that the DSCC is already cutting ad spending in the state.

The Washington Post notes most polls at this moment suggest Mitt Romney is in the lead nationally, but surveys in the nine or so swing states are registering a narrow advantage for President Obama.

“So here’s a prospect worth contemplating: What if Romney carries the popular vote, but Obama regains the presidency by winning 270 votes or more in the electoral college?”

“That kind of split decision between the electorate and the electoral college would mark the fifth time in American history — and the second time in a dozen years — that the person who occupies the White House was not the one who got the most votes on Election Day.”

Jason Sattler: Mitt Romney is losing the election that matters.