Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg tells Greg Sargent he has identified a key reason Mitt Romney’s last debate performance was a success: Romney successfully grabbed the mantle of change agent.

Said Greenberg: “The danger for Obama is that Romney would become the candidate of
change. Obama has the chance in this debate to
undermine that.”

“This explains Romney’s gains. For months he operated from the flawed
assumption that he could win by making the race all about Obama. Romney
began surging only when he broke through at the debate with an
affirmative case for his own agenda — because voters began entertaining
the idea that Romney represents change.”

Greenberg has new research backing up his point — and counseling Obama on how to prevent it from happening.

Jack Bohrer busts the myth, often repeated by Mitt Romney, that father George Romney dramatically “charged out of the 1964 Republican National Convention over the party’s foot-dragging on civil rights.”

“Only George Romney did not walk out of the 1964 Republican National Convention. He stayed until the very end, formally seconding Goldwater’s eventual nomination and later standing by while an actual walkout took place. He left the convention holding open the possibility of endorsing Goldwater and then, after a unity summit in Hershey, Pennsylvania, momentarily endorsed the Arizona senator. Then he changed his mind while his top aides polled ‘all-white and race-conscious’ Michigan communities for a ‘secret’ white backlash vote against LBJ’s civil rights advances — a backlash that might have made a Goldwater endorsement palatable at home. Finding the Republican label even more unpopular than civil rights in Michigan, Romney ultimately distanced himself from the entire party, including his own moderate Republican allies.”

Ben Smith: “It’s hard to blame Romney for passing on myths given him by his father or his father’s circle, or for having an idealized image of his father.”

John Heilemann: “What Obama stands to gain from the transaction is plain enough to see. The support of the political figure with the highest approval rating, 69 percent, of any in America. The suasive services of a surrogate who can talk the owls down from the trees. The imprimatur of a former president associated with a period of broad and deep prosperity, imbued with unparalleled credibility on matters economic, and possessing special traction with the white working- and ­middle-class voters whom Obama has always had a hard time reaching. What Obama stands to gain, in other words, is a healthy boost in his quest for reelection–one all the more invaluable in the wake of his dismal performance in the first debate.”

“The potential payoff for Clinton is more ineffable but no less substantial. Last time around, recall, Obama’s candidacy was based in part on the consignment of Clintonism to the dustbin of history. But now, with Obama running unabashedly as the inheritor of that creed, Clinton is reveling in seeing his legacy restored to what he regards as its rightful status: a restoration that will mightily benefit his wife if she hurls herself at the White House again in 2016. Speculation on that topic is rife within the Clinton diaspora; no one has a clue as to whether or not Hillary will run. But, equally, no one doubts that her husband dearly wants her to–mainly because, among members of the tribe, he can’t shut up about it.”

A new Florida International University/Miami Herald/El Nuevo Herald poll shows Mitt Romney is closing the gap on President Obama among likely Hispanic Florida voters.

Obama is ahead of Romney 51% to 44% among Hispanics, “a relatively narrow lead that could spell trouble for a Democratic campaign that’s counting on minority support as non-Hispanic white voters flock to the Republican ticket in droves.”

While Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is still only a blip in the polls, the New York Times notes he “is on the ballot in every state except Michigan and Oklahoma, enjoys the support of a few small ‘super PACs’ and is trying to tap into the same grass-roots enthusiasm that helped build Rep. Ron Paul a big following. And with polls showing the race between President Obama and Mitt Romney to be tight, Mr. Johnson’s once-fellow Republicans are no longer laughing.”

“Around the country, Republican operatives have been making moves to keep Mr. Johnson from becoming their version of Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate whose relatively modest support cut into Al Gore’s 2000 vote arguably enough to help hand the decisive states of Ohio and Florida to George W. Bush.”

First Read: “One of the more powerful undercurrents of this election has been the demographic advantage for the Democrats that every poll has found, with the degree of the advantage dependent on enthusiasm levels. The bottom line: Demography is an advantage for President Obama — and a challenge for Mitt Romney.”

“Our pollsters did an in-depth look at these fundamental shifts using all of the data we’ve collected over the last four month for the national NBC/WSJ poll. Our pollsters merged the numbers among likely voters from our two post-convention surveys from September, as well as our pre-convention June, July, and August polls and treated them as separate MEGA-surveys to compare with the 2008 exit poll. The results: Obama has seen erosion among men, whites (especially white independents), Midwest voters, and independents from what we saw in the 2008 exit poll. But that erosion has been offset somewhat by gains among Latinos (winning them 66%-32% in ’08 vs. 67%-25% June-Aug. and 71%-22% in Sept.), Democrats (from 89%-10% in ’08 to 92%-5% June-Aug. and 93%-5% in Sept.), and union households (from 59%-39% in ’08 to 59%-36% in June-Aug. and 61%-34% in Sept.).”

Writing in Newsweek, former Reagan budget director David Stockman takes a scalpel to Mitt Romney’s claims that he was a job creator at Bain Capital.

“That is the modus operandi of the leveraged-buyout business, and in an honest free-market economy, there wouldn’t be much scope for it because it creates little of economic value. But we have a rigged system–a regime of crony capitalism–where the tax code heavily favors debt and capital gains, and the central bank purposefully enables rampant speculation by propping up the price of financial assets and battering down the cost of leveraged finance.”

“So the vast outpouring of LBOs in recent decades has been the consequence of bad policy, not the product of capitalist enterprise. I know this from 17 years of experience doing leveraged buyouts at one of the pioneering private-equity houses, Blackstone, and then my own firm. I know the pitfalls of private equity. The whole business was about maximizing debt, extracting cash, cutting head counts, skimping on capital spending, outsourcing production, and dressing up the deal for the earliest, highest-profit exit possible. Occasionally, we did invest in genuine growth companies, but without cheap debt and deep tax subsidies, most deals would not make economic sense.”

“With less than a month until Election Day, the primary battlefields for the presidential campaign can be found in just three states: Ohio, Florida and Virginia,” Politico reports.

“In these big three, home to a combined 60 electoral votes, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are spending both the most money and the most time. Over the last two weeks, the candidates and their allies have aired the most TV ads in Ohio, Florida and Virginia, in that order. And over the same period, Obama and Romney have held more than three times as many campaign events in the big three than they have in the other six swing states combined.”

“In a rare example of political unity, both the Romney and Obama campaigns have expressed concern to the Commission on Presidential Debates about how the moderator of the Tuesday town hall has publicly described her role,” Mark Halperin reports.

“While an early October memorandum of understanding between the Obama and Romney campaigns and the bipartisan commission sponsoring the debates suggests CNN’s Candy Crowley would play a limited role in the Tuesday-night session, Crowley, who is not a party to that agreement, has done a series of interviews on her network in which she has suggested she will assume a broader set of responsibilities. As Crowley put it last week, ‘Once the table is kind of set by the town-hall questioner, there is then time for me to say, ‘Hey, wait a second, what about X, Y, Z?””

“In the view of both campaigns and the commission, those and other recent
comments by Crowley conflict with the language the two campaigns agreed
to, which delineates a more limited role for the moderator of the
town-hall debate. The questioning of the two candidates is supposed to
be driven by the audience members themselves — likely voters selected by
the Gallup Organization.”

National Journal: “Obama’s biggest problem tomorrow night isn’t Romney. It’s the debate’s format, which couldn’t be more difficult for an incumbent mounting a comeback.”

“If Hillary runs, she walks away with the nomination and then beats whichever Republican. It’s lights out.”

— Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D), quoted by the AP, on the 2016 presidential race.

Sarah Palin’s leadership political action committee “spent more than $774,000 during the year’s third quarter after taking in more than $843,500 — the bulk of it from donors who contributed $200 or less,” Politico reports.

A New York Magazine poll of political insiders, asked to predict the winner of the presidential election, finds President Obama overwhelmingly favored over Mitt Romney, 82% to 18%.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney among likely voters, 49% to 46%, “basically unmoved from the poll two weeks ago, just before the two candidates met in Denver for their first debate.”

“Nearly two-thirds say they do not need any more information before Election Day, and barely one in eight is undecided or says there is a chance he could change his vote. Even as voters overwhelmingly perceive that Romney won the first debate, the vast majority say their opinion of the president did not shift as a result.”

“But more people changed their views of Romney, largely in a positive direction. Overall, more than twice as many say their opinions of the former Massachusetts governor improved than say they worsened as a result of the debate. The strongest reaction is among Romney backers, 70 percent of whom say Denver made them think more highly of the GOP nominee.”

A Politico/GWU poll finds Obama ahead 48% to 47%.

A Newsmax/Zogby poll shows Obama leading 47% to 44%.

A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows President Obama leads Mitt Romney by a 59% to 31% among those who have already voted.

With the November 6 election just more than three weeks away, 7% of those surveyed said they had already voted either in person or by mail.

Here are the latest polls from the battleground states:

Colorado: Obama 48%, Romney 46% (Gravis)

Florida: Romney 49%, Obama 48% (Public Policy Polling)

North Carolina: Romney 49%, Obama 47% (Public Policy Polling)

The father of Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya who was killed in the attack in Benghazi last month, told Bloomberg his son’s death shouldn’t be politicized in the presidential campaign.

Said Jan Stevens: “It would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue.”