Today's installment of campaign-related news items that won't necessarily generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:
* New Quinnipiac/New York Times/CBS News polling shows President Obama leading Mitt Romney by six points in Florida (51% to 45%), six points in Ohio (50% to 44%), and 11 points in Pennsylvania (53% to 42%). Note the results are likely voters, not just registered voters.
* A new ad from the Obama campaign connects some interesting threads, reminding voters of the progress since the Bush/Cheney era, and hitting Romney for supporting tax breaks and increased military spending that would increase the deficit.
* The Quinnipiac/New York Times/CBS News polling also shows Sen. Bill Nelson (D) up by seven in Florida, Sen. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) ahead by 12 in Ohio, and Sen. Bob Casey (D) leading by 18 points in Pennsylvania.
* Romney is hitting the road again next week, launching a four-day bus tour that will bring the Republican to events from Virginia to South Florida.
* Speaking of Florida, while the aforementioned poll shows Obama with a six-point lead, PPP shows the president's margin at only one point, 48% to 47%.
* The president is not only starting to contribute to his own campaign, he's making a video about it.
* In Michigan, a new EPIC-MRA poll puts Obama ahead of Romney by six, 48% to 42%.
* Karl Rove's attack operation, Crossroads GPS, is investing $11 million in a new attack ad on the strength of the economic recovery.
* In Connecticut, former wrestling company executive Linda McMahon is doing so well in her Republican U.S. Senate primary, her campaign is already running ads with a general-election focus.
* And thanks to a series of recent controversies, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) was able to raise $1 million in July, which, of course, will only encourage her to continue to push the boundaries of decency.
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Am I the only one who suspects that that "The Whole Stimulus was Wasted!!!!!!" ad the RNC keeps running during the Olympics is a huge mistake for them because it causes people to associate the Republican brand with "America-hating Olympic buzzkill"?
You might have something on the marketing factors involved.
At this point, there's already mountains of evidence that the stimulus worked and that countercyclical fiscal policy works that it's hard to imagine it would be difficult to educate the public about it. (Eight years after the Great Depression began and we're still debating this just shows what a snow job the Republican Noise Machine and supply-side economics did on the buffoons in this country.) Of course, I have a difficult time of getting it through my head just how obtuse people are and end of continually overestimating the intelligence of large swaths of the American public.
Disgusted:You make a good point about overestimating the intelligence of the general public. After watching Jay Leno's Jay Walking, it does'nt surprise me that so many people are actually really stupid and gullible.Especially the consertive right's base.
Remember H. L. Mencken's statement: "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
The applies double when we're talking about the average voter.
Edit: Ouch!! (EIGHTY years after the Great Depression...) Hoping nobody thought that I thought the Great Depression was in 2004!
@joca41: I don't watch Leno religiously but I've seen several "Jay Walking" sections. I almost can't believe the particular stupidities that are on display there. Jeez, can anybody really be that damned dumb? Then I think back to when I was in high school and meeting sophomores and juniors that didn't know which coasts the Atlantic and Pacific were on. Others hadn't heard we'd landed on the moon. And here, we're ran over by various members of the empty-headed troll-etariat. I just can't imagine how one's cranium gets filled with so much empty space.
mpguy: To me, the biggest lie ever repeated by politicians is "The American public is much more intelligent than that." The biggest truth is we're all working with the same gene pool.
Crossroads and other Republican groups can run a bazillion dollars' worth of ads, and I'm sure they will. They'll probably have some small impact on that subset of the 5-6% of undecideds who live in swing states--the people at whom all ads are now really being aimed.
But Repubs have spent four years--and tons of money--demonizing Obama and everything he does from the time he gets up until he goes to bed each night. There's been a steady drumbeat of "the stimulus didn't work, 'Obamacare' is terrible, Obama is foreign, etc., etc."
At some point, message fatigue sets in. As anyone familiar with the ad game knows, after the saturation point, people stop hearing what the advertiser has to say. It becomes nothing more than background noise.
This is where the Republicans' strategy over the past four years starts to become a liability. Unless they come up with something new, those bazillions aren't going to produce much in the way of new votes. And that's the real test. That's one reason that the poll numbers have been fairly stable so far, much to the dismay of the Repubs.
Of course, some of those "likely voters" in PA may show up at their polling place on Nov 6, only to discover they're not even registered, or not allowed to vote for some other reason. The estimate is that 750 thousand voters may encounter this unpleasant "November surprise" in Pennsylvania alone...
In the words of my not-conservative next door neighbor: Don't take-a you voting privileges for granted. Call and make-a sure you on the list to vote.
Personally, I think she's long left the boundaries of decency. Somewhere from that Other Land, she lobbies for theocracy. She's a shrill, paranoid, sometimes-delusional crusader for a fantasy rendition of the whole of U.S. and Christian history. Hardly inside the world of decency at all.