HILLIARD, Ohio – In a couple of hours, the president will begin a full-day tour of Ohio’s metro suburbs, starting here, in the shadow of Columbus. I gave myself around 30 minutes to relax in my hotel room last night, leaving a TV turned to John Dickerson’s own CBS. The barrage of political ads was tremendous, and included American Crossroads’s 60-second spot about how Mitt Romney comforted a dying boy, the Club for Growth hitting Sherrod Brown on “unpaid taxes,” Americans for Job Security using a jogging woman’s monologue to describe how bad the economy was, and multiple hits from Restore Our Future, Romney-Ryan, and Obama-Biden. The Obama ad is the only one that does not, at some point, feature sad minor-key piano music and a poe-faced female star.
Nate Silver, who has come under a truly bizarre barrage of attacks this week, sees Obama’s leads holding.
Mr. Obama had one more terrible day in the polls, on Friday, Oct. 12, when Mr. Romney’s chances of winning the Electoral College rose to almost 40 percent in the forecast. But that was when Mr. Romney’s momentum stopped. Since then, Mr. Obama’s standing has rebounded slightly.
The great Neil King snapshots the Senate race in North Dakota.
As Jim Newell says, it’s funny to hear Mark Halperin cite state polling only because “insiders” have told him to look at it.
I’m going to take a risk here and peel back the curtain to tell you what insiders are thinking. This is not my opinion and this is not a projection of who’s going to win but insiders in both parties look at the last few days of swing state polls and say, “The President may have this.”
Brian Beutler pronounces the GOP agenda DOA. It’s not their fault!
And this is the smartest thing I’ve seen in days: Zeke Miller and Ben Smith on the deflated post-Sandy campaign.
The palpable sense: Americans are simply over the grinding presidential campaign. Take this week’s viral video featuring a weeping four-year-old begging her mother to be done with Romney and “Bronco Bama.”
And as swing state voters demonstrated a desire to get this campaign over with, even the faithful are losing altitude. The rallies aren’t just smaller: They’re less intense. In Greeley, audience members half-heartedly clapped along as country artist Lee Greenwood sang karaoke to his old hits. At a Biden rally last week in Florida, a group of older women tried in vain to keep a “Yes We Can” chant going for more than 20 seconds. In Reno last week with Romney, aides cordoned off a section of a large conference hall for the candidate, initially draping more than a hundred seats because the crowd was so thin. For Obama, away from a college town, the scene is the same — a few thousand supporters, mostly older, politely wait for the candidate. The call-and-response chants and non-stop cheering of 4 years ago, or even three weeks ago, are gone.
