Washington Post: “Mitt Romney’s campaign said Monday that it had raised $170.4 million in the month of September, falling just short of the staggering $181 million monthly total reported by President Obama’s reelection campaign.”

Joshua Green: “Until just over a week ago, President Obama’s campaign was on the cusp of doing something unprecedented in modern presidential politics: turning the election into a referendum on the challenger, Mitt Romney. Why is that so special? Because every prior example of an incumbent running for reelection in recent times has wound up being a referendum on the guy in the White House.”

“Those who run the re-election campaigns for sitting presidents are usually loath to admit this, especially when the preceding four years have not been a runaway success. Obama’s campaign is no different.”

“This would have been an impressive bit of jujitsu had Obama been able to
sustain it. But of course he couldn’t. The president’s poor showing in
the first debate, and Romney’s crisp and effective contrast, have broken
the spell. Now Obama is the one trying to reassure frantic supporters
and Romney the one rising in the polls. This suggests the election will
revert to something more like the historical mean.”

Here are the latest polls from the battleground, updated as needed:

Florida: Romney 49%, Obama 48% (Gravis)

Iowa: Obama 48%, Romney 48% (American Research Group)

Pennsylvania: Obama 49%, Romney 45% (Morning Call/Muhlenberg)

Pennsylvania: Obama 51%, Romney 44% (Public Policy Polling)

Virginia: Romney 48%, Obama 47% (American Research Group)

Elizabeth Warren (D) announced her U.S. Senate campaign in Massachusetts raised $12.1 million in the third quarter, the Boston Globe reports.

Meanwhile, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) revealed he had raised $7.45 million during the same span, his best fund-raising quarter so far.

Federal prosecutors and the FBI are in the final stages of a criminal probe into allegations that Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) misused campaign money to decorate his house, the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The investigation into possible misuse of campaign funds began before Mr. Jackson vanished from the public eye in June. At first, aides said he stopped working to receive treatment for exhaustion, but it was eventually revealed he had been at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., receiving treatment for a bipolar disorder. He returned to his Washington home in September but has remained out of the public eye even as he seeks another term in Congress.”

Chicago Sun Times: “The revelation that Jackson is under
federal scrutiny comes as questions have increasingly swirled around the
congressman’s absence from his official duties in Washington and the
campaign trail.”

A new video captures Jason Thompson, the son of former Wisconsin governor and current U.S. candidate Tommy Thompson (R), at a GOP gathering yesterday saying, “We have the opportunity to send President Obama back to Chicago — or Kenya.”

[Read more…]

“I am not goofy enough to be in the House, and I’m not senile enough to be in the Senate.”

— Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D), quoted by the AP, adding that he “prefers to be in charge than pay homage to congressional seniority rules.”

Nate Silver: “If the current polls hold, predicting the election outcome will boil down to making a series of educated guesses about the relationship between state and national polls, and between the Electoral College and the popular vote.”

“There have been plenty of elections before when the outcome was highly uncertain down the stretch run or on Election Day itself. But I am not sure that there has been one where different types of polls pointed in opposite directions. Anyone in my business who is not a bit terrified by this set of facts is either lying to himself — or he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

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.”