The Onion bypassed Obama and Romney and endorsed former Sen. John Edwards instead.

“Mr. Edwards conducted a protracted extramarital affair with a younger
woman while his wife was dying of cancer, and we like that he did this.”

The Salt Lake Tribune endorses President Obama over Mitt Romney, the candidate “we knew, or thought we knew, as one of us.”

“Sadly, it is not the only Romney, as his campaign for the White House has made abundantly clear, first in his servile courtship of the tea party in order to win the nomination, and now as the party’s shape-shifting nominee. From his embrace of the party’s radical right wing, to subsequent portrayals of himself as a moderate champion of the middle class, Romney has raised the most frequently asked question of the campaign: ‘Who is this guy, really, and what in the world does he truly believe?'”

Arizona U.S. Senate candidate Richard Carmona (D) told moderator Brahm Resnik that he’s “prettier” than CNN’s Candy Crowley during a U.S. Senate debate with Rep. Jeff Flake (R), the Arizona Republic reports.

[Read more…]

President Obama told a college crowd that when it comes to issues important to women’s health and jobs, Mitt Romney is distancing himself from past stances and suffers from a case of “Romnesia,” the AP reports.

Said Obama: “If you come down with a case of Romnesia… here’s the good news: Obamacare covers pre-existing conditions. We can fix you up. We’ve got a cure.”

[Read more…]

The Associated Press looks at the possibility of an Electoral College tie between President Obama and Mitt Romney which “would throw the decision to the House of Representatives, currently controlled by Republicans but up for grabs in this election.”

But the “most nightmarish outcomes of all might cause millions of Americans and foreigners to question the fairness of presidential elections. Suppose, for instance, Obama wins more popular votes than Romney, but the two men are tied in the Electoral College. The Constitution gives each state delegation to the U.S. House one vote, meaning a small state such as Idaho has vastly more proportional clout than a big state like California. If the post-2012 House looks like the current one, the Republicans in control would almost surely name Romney president.”

“It’s one thing to have the Supreme Court rule on one state’s recount practices, resulting in an Electoral College win for the person who finished second in nationwide ballots. It’s another thing to have the sharply partisan House of Representatives break an Electoral College tie in the runner up’s favor.”

Meanwhile, Salena Zito notes an election decided by the House of Representatives could pair Romney with Vice President Joe Biden.

“Field operatives have been undervalued in recent years, as the focus of campaigns has shifted to big-money ad-bombs, compounded by the super-PAC economy. But this presidential campaign is going to come down to a few percentage points in a half dozen states, and suddenly ground game is about to get a lot of respect.”

“So The Daily Beast decided to map out the Obama and Romney local headquarters across the country as one way of gauging the strength of each campaign’s ground game. And what we found was an overwhelming advantage–755 to 283–by the Obama campaign on at least this one metric.”

Charlie Cook: “I am now reconciled to the fact that this will be a race to the wire. I am watching Ohio and a handful of other swing states that are right at, or near, the 270-electoral-vote tipping point. In the end, the odds still favor the popular and electoral vote heading in the same direction, but the chances of a split like the one in 2000 are very real, along with the distinct possibility of ambiguity and vote-counting issues once again putting the outcome in question. Ugh.”

Here are the latest national polls of the presidential race:

Gallup: Romney 51%, Obama 45%

Hartford Courant/UConn: Obama 48%, Romney 45%

Public Policy Polling: Obama 48%, Romney 47%

Rasmussen: Obama 48%, Romney 48%

A man who was being paid to register voters by the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested after he was seen dumping registration forms into a dumpster, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Colin Small “was working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.”

Though the report says Small “was first hired by Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm that was fired by the party after suspect voter forms surfaced in Florida and other states,” his LinkedIn profile says he’s the RNC’s Grassroots Field Director.

First Read: “Is this campaign about one region and one region alone? How the Midwest goes, so goes this election? Now the question is whether Mitt Romney and Republicans have made inroads in the Midwestern battlegrounds or not. They say they have. But our new NBC/WSJ/Marist polls of Iowa and Wisconsin, plus our survey last week of Ohio, suggest that President Obama has built a firewall in the Midwest, even after Romney’s momentum from that first presidential debate.”

“In Wisconsin, Obama leads Romney by six points among likely voters, 51%-45%, which is virtually unchanged from the margin last month. In Iowa, Obama is up by eight points, 51%-43%, which also is nearly identical to where it was in September. And as we revealed last week, Obama was ahead in Ohio, 51%-45%. What’s significant here: If Obama wins all three states, he surpasses 270 electoral votes. But if Romney is able to pick off one of them, that widens the GOP’s path to 270 and narrows the Democratic one.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Marie Claire magazine in a wide-ranging interview that she will not run for president in 2016.

Said Clinton: “I have been on this high wire of national and international politics and leadership for 20 years. It has been an absolutely extraordinary personal honor and experience. But I really want to just have my own time back. I want to just be my own person.”

“I was a ’73 graduate. I should have been ’72, but I stayed an extra year to work on our party rating.”

— West Virginia U.S. Senate John Raese (R), quoted by the Daily Athenaeum, on attending West Virginia University.

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) gave a frank assessment to the Scranton Times-Tribune of why Sen. Bob Casey (D) is in a much closer than expected re-election race with Tom Smith (R).

Said Rendell: “Casey? He hasn’t run a campaign. He’s run one ad, a stupid tea party ad. The tea party ad isn’t bad, but that’s all they’ve run. They’ve run a non-campaign up until now, and Smith has put a lot of money into the campaign. … You start spending money, that’ll change.”

“With modern technology and science, you can’t find one instance… There is no such exception as life of the mother, and as far as health of the mother, same thing.”

— Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), quoted by WGN, saying he was against abortion “without exception” because it’s no longer medically necessary to conduct an abortion to save the life of a mother.