late afternoon update: Tuesday's polls are even weirder than yesterday's but good news for Ohio--the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear the GOPer state gov's appeal on early voting, so the final weekend of early voting must happen, or GOPer officials face contempt of court or worse. Nate Silver notes that the stats show the second debate is potentially just as important as the first in moving poll numbers. Not that there's any pressure or anything.
After the ABC/Washington Post poll, the many polls issued Monday offered a very mixed bag. Poll guru Nate Silver essentially threw up his hands and couldn't say what was going on. Though he upped President Obama's chances for reelection fractionally from yesterday, to about 2 in 3.
Looking at the bright side, several observers agree with Steve S. at DKos:
With about three weeks until election day, and 43 polls in the hopper from this weekend and Monday, we can draw a few very tenuous conclusions about the state of play in the 2012 election cycle: The presidential race has moved clearly back into a very competitive position, although President Obama may have finally stalled the Romney momentum on the polling front over this weekend. Conversely, the GOP's fortunes on the Senate front seem to be getting worse, with it now looking just as likely that the Democrats will gain seats in the upper chamber than they are to lose the Senate altogether.
Adding to the confusion are the polls that show a 4 or 5 point edge for Romney in the swing states, and a 5 point edge for President Obama.
But here's some news from Florida on absentee and early voting: absentee vote requests, which were dominated by Republicans in 2008 when Obama won the state, are now nearly even, with Dems just a few percentage points down. “It’s not good news for Republicans,” said Brad Gomez, a political science professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who studies voter turnout....The Obama campaign has 102 offices, up from 58 in Florida four years ago, and has registered about 320,000 new voters, up from about 200,000 in 2008. Republicans have signed up about 49,000 new voters in Florida, state data show, and have 47 offices for the presidential campaign.
And even those most invested in the "dead heat" thesis are reluctant to conclude that Obama is losing Ohio, even with the extreme barrage of Romney TV ads in that state. And events like this won't help the Romneyryan ticket: of Ryan's attempted photo op of compassionately helping the poor, the Washington Post reported: "The head of a northeast Ohio charity says that the Romney campaign last week “ramrodded their way” into the group’s Youngstown soup kitchen so that GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan could get his picture taken washing dishes in the dining hall...."
He added: “The photo-op they did wasn’t even accurate. He did nothing. He just came in here to get his picture taken at the dining hall.”
Ryan had stopped by the soup kitchen for about 15 minutes on his way to the airport after his Saturday morning town hall in Youngstown. By the time he arrived, the food had already been served, the patrons had left, and the hall had been cleaned.
Upon entering the soup kitchen, Ryan, his wife and three young children greeted and thanked several volunteers, then donned white aprons and offered to clean some dishes. Photographers snapped photos and TV cameras shot footage of Ryan and his family washing pots and pans that did not appear to be dirty."
That this appeared in the Washington Post made for an amusing story for the politically knowing. But it's the Ohio newspapers--like this one--that are significant in telling this story:
Juanita Sherba, St. Vincent’s Saturday coordinator for the dining hall, said she gave the Ryan campaign approval that day for the visit by the candidate and his family. Sherba say she now realizes it wasn’t her call to make.
The event “was a photo op,” she said. “It was the phoniest piece of baloney I’ve ever been associated with. In hindsight, I would have never let him in the door.”
When an advance person from the Mitt Romney/Ryan campaign asked about the visit, Sherba said it took her by surprise. “I didn’t know it was my place to say ‘no,’” she said. “I made a mistake.” The event was completely staged by the campaign, she said.
“They couldn’t have cared less,” Sherba said. “The advance man said Paul Ryan wanted to come and talk to our clientele, but he didn’t.”
People in that part of the world (generally speaking, my original part of the world) do not like phony, and Romneyryan already has a big problem with phony. With any luck, that will become abundantly clear tonight.
As for the all-important debate strategy, Andy Borowitz reveals:
With his polite and well-mannered performance widely panned in the first Presidential debate, President Barack Obama is under mounting pressure to prove that he can act like an asshole in the second debate tomorrow night, a campaign aide confirmed. “In America, we demand that our President remain cool and calm in a crisis but go batshit in a debate,” the aide said. “Tuesday night is all about that second piece.”
However, success is not assured:
But even as Mr. Obama worked around the clock to practice being a douche, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, doubted his efforts would succeed. “Being an asshole isn’t a skill that you can just pick up overnight,” Mr. Rhoades said. “Mitt Romney’s been working on it all his life.”
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