Philadelphia Inquirer: “In the Columbus media market, home to the broadcast stations she watches, 18,482 presidential campaign ads aired during a typical late August week… That was three times more than in the close 2004 election and double the volume of four years ago.”

“Most of the spots are negative: President Obama, hapless failure; Republican Mitt Romney, heartless plutocrat.”

“The ads will not let up in Columbus, or Cleveland or Cincinnati or Toledo because Ohio is perhaps the most closely contested political real estate in the nation, a pivotal swing state with 18 electoral votes. Democratic and Republican strategists alike consider it a must-win.”

“Mitt Romney I think has an advantage, because he’s been through 20 of
these debates in the primaries over the last year.”

— Obama adviser Robert Gibbs, quoted by CNN.

A must-read: Oops! A Diary from the 2012 Campaign Trail by Jay Root.

Only available in iBooks format so far.

A new Mason-Dixon poll in Montana finds challenger Denny Rehberg (R) with a slight edge over Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) in U.S. Senate race, 48% to 45%.

Said pollster Brad Coker: “Usually, if an incumbent is trailing, that’s a problem. But this is just too close to call.”

The New York Times looks at the unlikely revival of Ralph Reed who soon “plans to unleash a sophisticated, microtargeted get-out-the-evangelical-vote operation that he believes could nudge open a margin of victory if Mr. Romney can keep the race close.”

“White evangelicals are a crucial voting constituency, 26 percent of the 2008 electorate and overwhelmingly Republican in recent presidential cycles, exit polls show. With so few truly undecided voters left, bumping up evangelical turnout in swing states like Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and Ohio would almost certainly help Mr. Romney.”

A new Enquirer/Ohio Newspaper Organization poll in Ohio shows President Obama leading Mitt Romney in the crucial battleground state by five points, 51% to 46%.

Key finding: “When survey participants were asked which candidate would do the best job of improving economic conditions in Ohio, Obama prevailed by 5 points.”

Said pollster Eric Rademacher: “Clearly, how Ohioans view the two candidates in terms of their ability to improve Ohio’s economy over the next four years will go a long way in determining who wins Ohio’s 18 electoral votes.”

Politico: “Republican super PACs are about to face a potentially existential test of their reach and impact as the 2012 election cycle comes to a close, with their spending being closely watched as a way of answering a central question at the core of modern American politics: can an avalanche of money from outside groups move the needle in the presidential race and Senate contests across the country.”

A new Tampa Bay Times/Miami Herald/Bay News 9 poll in Florida finds President Obama edging Mitt Romney, 48% to 47%.

Said pollster Brad Coker: “It’s still very much a toss-up. It’s a turnout game.”

The New York Times reports New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), who is mulling a presidential bid in 2016, and his inner circle have their eyes fixed on Hillary Clinton, “whose already sky-high stature among Democratic activists was enhanced by her husband’s crowd-pleasing speech this month at the party’s convention in Charlotte, N.C., and who can count on broad support if she decides to run.”

“Mrs. Clinton complicates Mr. Cuomo’s ambitions in several ways. Despite the fact that she hails from Illinois, she is now viewed as a New Yorker and commands deep loyalty from the state’s Democratic establishment. And Mr. Cuomo, 54, reveres her husband, former President Bill Clinton; he views Mr. Clinton as a mentor who helped him begin a career in politics, according to Cuomo friends and associates.”

One Democrat close to Cuomo said “the situation was making the Cuomo camp cranky, in part because the governor, a skilled strategic thinker, did not like to be captive to others’ ambitions.”

Mitt Romney’s campaign packed the audience for the Univision forum at the University of Miami this week by busing in supporters “after exhausting the few conservative groups on campus,” BuzzFeed reports.

Staffers even threatened to reschedule the event if organizers did not allow the exception to their student-only rule.

Mitt Romney himself also refused to come out on stage after anchors noted he “had agreed to give the network 35 minutes, and that Obama had agreed to a full hour the next night.” Romney insisted they re-tape the introduction.

Said one of the Univision anchors: “It was a little bit of disrespect for us.”

A voter-ID mutiny launched by two Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania counties “showed signs of spreading across the state Friday, as Philadelphia and a handful of other local governments said they, too, would consider issuing poll-ready identification cards through county-run nursing homes and colleges,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.

“The move exploits a loophole in the new law that allows both colleges and senior-care centers to provide such cards to anyone who lives in the county — not just to the people who attend those colleges or reside in those centers.”

“With so much at stake in this election, both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan should ‘go rogue’ and not hold back from telling the American people the true state of our economy and national security. They need to continue to find ways to break through the filter of the liberal media to communicate their message of reform.”

— Sarah Palin, in a statement to the Weekly Standard.

The Week: “The GOP effort to seize control of the Senate is losing steam, and some Democrats are boasting that even the GOP’s House majority is imperiled.”

Paul Ryan “was booed at the annual AARP convention Friday after saying that, if elected, their Republican administration would repeal the nation’s healthcare law as the best way to save Medicare,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Just five minutes into his talk at the gathering of the powerful 50-and-older lobby, Mitt Romney’s running mate — the architect of the Republican proposal to change Medicare for the next generation of seniors — was repeatedly interrupted as he criticized President Obama’s healthcare law.”

A source close to the Romney campaign told Politico that the decision was made to release Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax return “so that there would be some distance between that headline and the debate, and to do the best the campaign can with an issue on which voters have likely already absorbed a lot of information.”

“There was also no ideal time for the release of the information, but Friday was after five days spent discussing remarks Romney made in a secretly taped fundraising video about 47 percent of Americans considering themselves ‘victims,’ and not paying taxes. Providing information about his own tax rate seems geared toward eliminating the question about whether he himself has at any point not paid taxes, but without providing the returns themselves.”

Think Progress: 10 questions Romney should answer about his taxes.

Wall Street Journal: “The Obama campaign wants to set a low bar for the president’s performance, reflecting in part the reality that the president’s debating skills are weaker than his other political assets. More importantly, the campaign is looking to the three presidential debates, the first of which will be in Denver on Oct. 3, not for a breakthrough, but as a fresh chance to deliver the president’s core messages.”

“Mr. Romney and his advisers, by contrast, are talking up the opportunity for the debates to shake up the race. His top advisers have made clear he is spending a lot of time preparing. He began in the middle of the summer and spent almost all of the Democratic National Convention at the secluded Vermont estate of Kerry Healey, his former lieutenant governor in Massachusetts, where he ran practice sessions. Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) played Mr. Obama in the simulations…

The extensive early preparation is unusual for a presidential
candidate, as is the fact that his advisers publicized his preparation
so widely.”