That Biden photo everyone is talking about was apparently an attempt to recreate this classic scene from movie history. Vid after the jump. Read More
On a morning when newspapers across the country are splashed with a feel-good image of President Obama getting man-hugged by a burly Florida restaurant owner, Mitt Romney is embroiled in a bizarre controversy over unfurling, seemingly, three or four different and contradictory positions on ‘Obamacare’ and the fate of people with pre-existing medical conditions.
Some of this is a sign of a disorganized campaign (one I suspect was caught off guard by the potency of the Democratic convention) and some is new evidence of Romney’s ingrained flipfloppery. But some of it, I suspect, goes to the heart of the candidate in a different way. Read More
Simple formula: the more Romney goes hard Culture War, the more his campaign chiefs are getting freaked by the polls.
Never underestimate how much of a campaign’s tempo can be affected by arbitrary facts of the lives of the reporters who cover it. In this case, campaign reporters are coming off two weeks of convention reporting and travel. So there’s been a weird calm of sorts over the campaign. What has turned people’s attention, though, is increasing — though still incomplete — signs that President Obama got a significant bounce out of his convention after Gov. Romney got little if any.
But in addition to that there’s been a jagged and ragged quality to the Romney campaign over the last couple days. Read More
A few of you have asked how it could be that President Obama appears to be surging into a small lead and yet the PollTracker Average just moved Mitt Romney slightly ahead. Very good question. So let me explain a bit about our methodology. (More in our FAQ here.) Read More
Let me start with the usual caveat that tracking polls are not only notoriously unstable; they are that way largely by design. What’s more, convention bounces are often ephemeral. But we’re beginning to see real signs of a significant bump for President Obama coming off last week’s convention.
Before looking at the numbers, I would make one point. Whatever we learn about an Obama bump, I think the bigger issue isn’t whether Obama got one but that Romney seems not to have gotten one. And he’s the one who needed it. Read More
Fear of Obama taking G-d off coins emerges as new reason Romney is hiding his money in Switzerland and the Caymans.
With the internet “map wars” heating up, Google is trying to up its game with new, super-hi-res maps.
As I noted last week, TPM will soon be replacing Facebook comments with new commenting system which will allow users to login via various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.) or choose a native TPM log-in.
We’re tentatively planning to have the new system up and running next week. Please let us know via the comments email if you have questions.
PollTracker editor Kyle Leighton looks at the cutback in ad spending in swing states and what it means for the electoral map: