Just published: Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man by Walter Stahr.

The Economist: “Seward was, Mr Stahr asserts, America’s second-greatest secretary of state, giving way only to John Quincy Adams, the force behind the Monroe Doctrine.”

“Seward’s problem is that he is condemned to be in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln. It might not have turned out so. At the 1860 Republican Party convention, Seward, then in his second term as a United States senator, had been favoured to win the party’s presidential nomination when the lesser-known Lincoln snatched it from him. Needing Seward’s Washington expertise, Lincoln tapped him for secretary of state. So powerful did Seward remain that he was targeted by the April 1865 cabal that killed Lincoln, surviving with some nasty knife wounds.”

Sources close to the Romney campaign tell National Review that Rep. Paul Ryan has reached out to conservative journalists — including George Will, Paul Gigot, Larry Kudlow — to express confidence about the Republican ticket’s chances, fielded questions, and asked for frank assessments.

“Ryan has made the calls one by one from the trail. The private press talks, which are ongoing, have often been lengthy and candid.”

“Obama campaign activists and volunteers have organized a massive debate-night effort, hosting 3,200 debate watch parties across 50 states for next Wednesday’s debate,” Politico reports.

Michelle Cottle: “Romney may be a good debater. He may even be a great debater. But at this point his team has fumbled the expectations game to the point where the governor will need to perform at a level well above anything we’ve seen from him to date if he wants to pull off the “W.” Just holding his own against the president — often a challenger’s primary hurdle — won’t change the game, and, at this point, a game changer is what people are demanding.”

Florida elections officials said that “at least 10 counties have identified suspicious and possibly fraudulent voter registration forms turned in by a firm working for the Republican Party of Florida,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“The controversy in Florida — which began with possibly fraudulent forms that first cropped up in Palm Beach County — has engulfed the Republican National Committee, which admitted Thursday that it urged state parties in seven swing states to hire the firm, Strategic Allied Consulting.The RNC paid the company at least $3.1 million — routed through the state parties of Florida, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia — to register voters and run get-out-the-vote operations. Wisconsin and Ohio had not yet paid the firm for get-out-the-vote operations it was contracted to do.”

Kellyanne Conway, a consultant for U.S. Senate candidate Todd Akin (R), compared her client’s fortitude in staying in the race to that of deadly cult leader David Koresh, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.

Said Conway: “I’ve expressed this to Todd as my client for a while now, I’ve expressed it to him directly. The first day or two where it was like the Waco with the David Koresh situation where they’re trying to smoke him out with the SWAT teams and the helicopters and the bad Nancy Sinatra records. Then here comes day two and you realize the guy’s not coming out of the bunker. Listen, Todd has shown his principle to the voters.”

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) accuses challenger Patrick Murphy (D) of being a belligerent drunk in a tough new ad.

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“Watching his father, George, eat an entire batch of home-made ice cream that was accidentally sweetened with salt, so that it wouldn’t go to waste, had a huge impact on Mitt. Waste is simply not tolerated.”

— Laurie Romney, quoted by the Colorado Statesman, describing her
father-in-law’s frugality.

Susquehanna pollster Jim Lee acknowledged on a conference call for Pennsylvania Republicans that President Obama’s campaign did a good job defining Mitt Romney over the summer.

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Noam Scheiber: “The conventional wisdom on Obama’s recent surge is that it’s due largely to Mitt Romney’s 47% disaster, and there’s clearly something to this. If nothing else, it’s given Team Obama grist for absolutely devastating ads. But it’s worth pointing out another dynamic that’s been overlooked here: The escalating disaster that is Paul Ryan.”

“At the time of his selection, a number of pundits argued Ryan’s strategic benefits, suggesting he would boost Romney by energizing conservatives, or by allowing Romney to run as the candidate of big ideas, or that he would at least be the party’s best defender of the Medicare plan Romney was going to have to defend whether he wanted to or not. This seemed like a stretch at the time–after all, Ryan’s Medicare plan proved to be a massive liability the one time voters weighed in on it. But who could say for sure? Fast forward a month-and-a-half and the numbers look pretty persuasive.”

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

Michigan: Obama 50%, Romney 46% (Gravis Marketing)

New Hampshire: Obama 50%, Romney 45% (American Research Group)

Pennsylvania: Obama 49%, Romney 42% (Morning Call/Muhlenberg College)

Virginia: Obama 49%, Romney 47% (American Research Group)

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), chairman of the GOP Senate campaign effort, told the Louisville Courier-Journal he didn’t think Rep. Todd Akin (R) could win in Missouri adding they have “no plans” to invest money in the Senate race.

Said Cornyn: “I just think that this is not a winnable race. We have to make tough calculations based on limited resources and where to allocate it, where it will have the best likelihood of electing a Republican senator.”

Earlier this week, the NRSC issued a statement suggesting it might reverse course and support Alkin.

Republicans no longer think they’re going to retake the Senate, according to the latest National Journal Political Insiders Poll, “a stunning drop in optimism for a party that began 2012 confident it would regain control of the chamber.”

Just 4% of GOP insiders rate their chances as “high,” a free fall in confidence from February when 66% of Republicans were bullish they’d win the four seats necessary to take control.