What election is Michael Scherer talking about? Go read the whole thing if you are a bed wetter right now.
Throughout much of September, polls showed the incumbent President with a clear lead, sometimes as much as eight points nationally. Then he lost the first debate, and things began to change. First, the national polls showed a tie, then a slight advantage for the challenger, albeit inside the margin of error. After the second debate, CNN reported that the challenger “appears to be holding the ground he gained against [the President] after the first presidential debate, according to a recent poll.”
Josh Marshall: “I think with a few more sharp cuts and some of that foreboding voiceover work something like this could be a pretty lethal campaign ad for the Obama folks.” Indeed.
“We weren’t geniuses last week and we’re not stupid this week. It’s going to be a tight race. We’ve always said that.” — An unnamed Obama adviser, in an interview with Mark Halperin, while adding that “we have more routes to win than he does.”
“That’s my party: Irrational overconfidence followed by irrational despair.” — Democratic consultant Jim Jordan, quoted by Politico, on the growing angst among Democrats as Mitt Romney surges in the polls.
Nate Silver mulls over the latest presidential race polls at Five Thirty Eight, and says, “Mitt Romney remains in a considerably stronger polling position than he was before last Wednesday’s debate in Denver. But the polls released on Sunday did not tell quite as optimistic a story for him as those in the debate’s immediate aftermath…Based on the numbers that the tracking polls published on Sunday, however, Mr. Obama’s lead was down to just 1.7 percentage points on average — a net shift of 2 points toward Mr. Romney since the debate…If the polls settle in at showing something like a 1- or 2-point lead for Mr. Obama by this point next week, that would be reasonably well in line with where our model and others think that the election “should” be based on economic trends; it would no longer be as appropriate to think of Mr. Romney as being an underachieving candidate.”
Finally, here is a video of Prime Minister Julia Gillard of Australia kicking her opposition’s ass:
Read the full story here.