Wisconsin U.S. Senate candidate Tommy Thompson (R) apparently has a hard time keeping track of how many homes he owns, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports.
“Three,” the former governor responded last week at a campaign event. When pressed if there was another one, he answered “No” without hesitation.
“Only later did a correction come from his campaign staff: He actually has one more place he calls home.”
A new Politico/George Washington University Tracking Poll shows President Obama just ahead of Mitt Romney nationally among likely voters, 49% to 48%.
Key findings: “The head-to-head numbers have held remarkably steady through the past three weeks, but there’s been a notable shift of intensity from the Democrats to the Republicans since the party conventions over a month ago… Among those extremely likely to vote, Romney actually leads Obama 52% to 46%. That’s up from a 2-point lead last week.”
Most of the survey’s calls were made before Romney’s strong performance at the first presidential debate in Denver.
“They’re going to be pouring Jolt Cola down his throat. He’ll have a bayonet in his teeth.”
— GOP strategist Mike Murphy, on Meet the Press, saying Vice President Joe Biden will be in “attack mode” for the vice presidential debate this week.
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A new Military Times poll finds the professional core of the U.S. military overwhelmingly favors Mitt Romney over President Obama in the upcoming election, 66% to 26%.
New York Times: “In 2012, it is not enough for candidates to shake some hands, kiss a baby or two and run some TV ads. They also need to be posting funny little animations on the blogging site Tumblr.”
“If the presidential campaigns of 2008 were dipping a toe into social media like Facebook and Twitter, their 2012 versions are well into the deep end. They are taking to fields of online battle that might seem obscure to the non-Internet-obsessed — sharing song playlists on Spotify, adding frosted pumpkin bread recipes to Pinterest and posting the candidates’ moments at home with the children on Instagram.”
“I can’t always say the same.”
— President Obama, quoted by the AP, noting how celebrities at a campaign fundraiser were able to perform flawlessly night after night while taking a shot at his own lackluster debate showing last week.
Here are the latest polls from the battleground states, updated as needed:
Colorado: Obama 47%, Romney 43% (Selzer)
Virginia: Obama 50%, Romney 47% (Public Policy Polling)
Nate Silver: “On average, the four tracking polls showed Mr. Obama with a 3.7 percentage point lead between the convention and the debate… Based on the numbers that the tracking polls published on Sunday, however, Mr. Obama’s lead was down to just 1.7 percentage points on average — a net shift of 2 points toward Mr. Romney since the debate.”
“But that calculation potentially underestimates Mr. Romney’s gains since only about two-thirds of the interviews in these polls were conducted after the debate. If Mr. Romney gained 2 points based on two-thirds of the interviews being conducted after the debate, that would imply a 3-point gain for him based on the post-debate interviews alone.”
New York Times: “Large numbers of Venezuelans turned out to vote on Sunday in a landmark election that could give President Hugo Chávez a new term to extend and deepen his socialist revolution or replace him with a youthful, more moderate challenger, Henrique Capriles Radonski.”
“For the first time since Mr. Chávez took office in 1999, the outcome of a presidential election was in doubt. His long hold on power and his autocratic grip over all branches of government have led some in the opposition to question whether he would accept a defeat.”
Washington Post: “The wild card in the contest between two markedly different men that
began eight months ago is Chavez’s health. The 58-year-old former army
paratrooper, famous for his seemingly boundless energy and his
hours-long speeches, had until the past three months been mostly out of
sight, as doctors here and in Cuba treated him for a cancerous tumor.
Chavez said he is cured, but details of his illness are a state secret.”
Update: The Venezuela electoral council says Chavez won re-election, the AP reports.
“I was so excited to see that because I was thinking to myself, finally people are seeing the guy we know. Finally — I mean didn’t you kind of think of Ronald Reagan when you were watching that?”
— Rep. Paul Ryan, quoted by ABC News, on Mitt Romney’s performance in the first presidential debate.
Amy Walter: “Despite earlier predictions by the Romney campaign that they would be competitive in traditionally blue states like Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, they are putting no serious effort into any of them. Moreover, the Paul Ryan pick gave Romney only a short-lived bounce in Wisconsin. The latest polls in the Badger State show Obama with a healthy advantage in the state. This has left Romney has a very narrow path to 270, and no room for error. If Romney loses Ohio and Wisconsin, he would have no choice but to win almost every single other battleground state to win.”
The Saturday Night Live portrayal of the first presidential debate was dead on.
Ben Smith: “More of the 2012 cycle’s descents into fantasyland — the unskewing of polls and BLS paranoia most obvious among them — have featured Republicans than Democrats, prompting some on the left to argue that American conservatives have a particular hostility to reality. And certainly, the conservative movement has long nourished more skepticism of the mainstream media and of some forms of government authority than has the left.”
“But there’s probably a simpler explanation for at least some of this: Mitt Romney has spent most of the year losing, and so the Republicans are the ones feeling compelled to re-imagine the polls. That Democrats share, at least, the impulse became clear Wednesday night when a CNN snap poll showed Romney winning overwhelmingly. The liberal twittersphere erupted with skepticism over a sample that, an easy misread suggested, was tilted toward Southern Whites.”
A new Western New England University poll finds Elizabeth Warren (D) is leading Sen. Scott Brown (R) in their U.S. Senate race by five points, 50% to 45%.
A Washington Post investigation finds that, contrary to many popular perceptions, lawmakers don’t get rich by merely being in Congress. Rich people who go to Congress, though, keep getting richer while they’re there.
The report also found that “the wealthiest one-third of lawmakers were largely immune from the Great Recession, taking the fewest financial hits and watching their investments quickly recover and rise to new heights. But more than 20 percent of the members of the current Congress — 121 lawmakers — appeared to be worse off in 2010 than they had been six years earlier, and 24 saw their reported wealth slide into negative territory.”
“Mitt Romney, his friends often say, is a private man in a public world. But with just one month left until the election, he has calculated that to win the presidency he must do what for years he has been loath to: share intimate stories about his life,” the Washington Post reports.
“So, as the sun set on his rally here Friday night, the Republican nominee, buoyed by his successful turn on the debate stage, for the first time publicly related emotionally powerful anecdotes. Romney told of ministering to the needy in his Mormon church, including a 14-year-old who was dying of leukemia and summoned ‘Brother Romney’ to his bedside. He also spoke of an old friend who ended up a quadriplegic after an accident and came to see Romney recently, the day before he died.”
New York Times: “An adviser said that Mr. Romney decided on his own that he wanted to
tell those stories onstage. But the move was also couched in a broader
campaign strategy to encourage Mr. Romney to reveal a more caring,
personal side of himself, a counter to his reputation as a data-driven
technocrat.”
In the wake of President Obama’s widely panned performance in his first debate against Mitt Romney, the Washington Post says the stakes for Vice President Biden “are suddenly higher than ever. In the Oct. 11 vice-presidential debate he must not only avoid making any gaffes but also try to puncture his Republican opponent’s arguments on taxes, entitlement reform and deficit reduction, something Obama was criticized for failing to do last week.”
“The pressure on Ryan has risen as well. Romney greatly exceeded expectations, appearing both presidential and in command of the debate stage. Ryan, who has never before debated at the national level, must prove that he is potential presidential material — while also defending the numbers that Romney put forth last week, especially on tax cuts.”
Mark Halperin: “Is Paul Ryan’s goal to win the debate or just not lose it?”
Just out: Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld.
A New York Times review calls it an “electrifying examination of a newly declassified treasure trove of documents detailing our government’s campaign of surveillance of the Berkeley campus during the ’60s. Rosenfeld spent 30 years fighting to compel the government to release
more than 300,000 pages of documents about the illegal spying program,
an effort the F.B.I. spent almost a million dollars opposing.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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