Month: October 2012

Latest Battleground State Polls

Buck Banks

Here are the latest polls from the battleground:

Colorado: Romney 50%, Obama 46% (Rasmussen)

Michigan: Obama 52%, Romney 43% (Angus Reid)

Ohio: Obama 48%, Romney 48% (Angus Reid)

Ohio: Obama 50%, Romney 45% (CBS News/Quinnipiac)

Pennsylvania: Obama 50%, Romney 45% (Morning Call/Muhlenberg)

Pennsylvania: Obama 48%, Romney 44% (Pulse Opinion Research)

Virginia: Obama 47%, Romney 46% (Pulse Opinion Research)

Wisconsin: Obama 51%, Romney 46% (Angus Reid)

Wisconsin: Obama 50%, Romney 47% (Pulse Opinion Research)

Romney Family Buys Voting Machines That Will Be Used in Battleground States Ohio and Colorado On Nov. 6

Jon Ponder

All Voices:

Tagg Romney, the son of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, has purchased electronic voting machines that will be used in the 2012 elections in Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, Washington and Colorado.

“Late last month, Gerry Bello and Bob Fitrakis at FreePress.org broke the story of the Mitt Romney/Bain Capital investment team involved in H.I.G. Capital which, in July of 2011, completed a “strategic investment” to take over a fair share of the Austin-based e-voting machine company Hart Intercivic,” according to independent journalist Brad Friedman.

But Friedman is not the only one to discover the connection between the Romney family, Bain Capital, and ownership of voting machines.

Truth out reports:

[…]

Stop Calling to ‘Bring Back’ Jobs We Never Had

Buck Banks

Ten years ago, approximately zero Americans were employed in manufacturing tablet computers and smartphones and that’s still the case today. But there’s been enormous net growth in the number of Americans whose jobs relate, in whole or in part, to the tablet and smartphone industry… The entire ecosystem couldn’t exist until the phones and tablets can be built cheaply enough to sell to a mass audience. Americans never had any jobs manufacturing iPads. But thanks to the fact that Chinese factories are churning out iPads, lots of people have jobs that wouldn’t exist if the iPad wasn’t available as a hit product.

— Matthew Yglesias, writing for Slate, astutely pointing out that efforts to “bring back” many of the manufacturing jobs performed in China to the US don’t make sense “for the very good reason that it was never here in the first place.”

Gallup Internals Show Obama Up by 4-Plus Points in the Northeast, Midwest and West – But Down by 22 Points in the Old Confederacy

Jon Ponder

graph-gallup-tracking-regional

Ezra Klein at the Washington Post Wonkblog published the chart above. It explains why Romney is leading President Obama by a whopping 7 percentage points in the current Gallup daily tracking poll. Klein also says it suggests that Obama could well win decisively in the Electoral College but lose just as decisively in the popular vote — a much more lopsided (not to mention legitimate) version of what happened in 2000, when George W. Bush was awarded Florida’s Electoral College votes by Republicans on the Supreme Court, while Al Gore won the popular ballot by over 500,000 votes.

(It also happened in 1876, when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won in the Electoral College but lost to his Democratic opponent, Samuel Tilden, by 300,000 votes; and in 1888, when Republican Benjamin Harrison won in the Electoral College but lost the popular vote to Democrat Grover Cleveland, by about 100,000 votes.)

Klein does not go there, but what screams out about this breakout is that the United States’ first African-American president is ahead by what might be called a “normal” majority — an average of 4.6 percentage points — in every region of the country, except for the states of the Old Confederacy, where he is behind by an insurmountable 22 points.

[…]

Republican Tax Policies Added the Portion of the 47% Who are Poor

Trish

Kim Dixon at Reuters:

Mitt Romney has distanced himself from his remarks lamenting the nearly 47 percent of Americans who do not owe federal income taxes, but his fellow Republicans helped engineer the very tax breaks that have put many in that category. And little change is expected soon.

Economist: ‘There is some degree of disconnect between complaining about the 47% and yet supporting the policies that brought it about’

A key reason: The breaks in question – the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit – are based on core Republican philosophies of encouraging work to lift people out of poverty, Republican aides and many conservatives say.

The number of Americans not owing federal income taxes has been growing since the mid-1980s, and the increase largely stems from expansion of these two tax credits – championed by Republicans from conservative economist Milton Friedman to former President Ronald Reagan.

“It is absolutely true – there is some degree of disconnect between complaining about the 47 percent and yet supporting the policies that brought it about,” said economist Alan Viard of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

The income credit began under Republican President Gerald Ford and was significantly expanded by Reagan. The child credit doubled to $1,000 under Republican President George W. Bush.

Read the full story.