Facing South’s Chris Kromm takes a look at “What’s going on in the Southern swing states?” and concludes that that “the reality is that polls show Obama’s changing prospects in the Southern swing states are completely in line with what’s happened nationally.” Regarding Virginia and Florida, Kromm notes:

* Virginia is Obama’s best hope in the South. He won the state by more than 230,000 votes in 2008, and it still ranks with Ohio among the most hotly-contested national battlegrounds. In the polls, Obama averages a miniscule .8-point lead. According to The New York Times’ popular poll-watching blog FiveThirtyEight, as of now that translates into an equally-narrow 54 percent chance of Obama winning the state.
* Florida has some Democrats more worried. After Obama won the state by 2.5 points in 2008 — and enjoying good polling numbers at different times in 2012 — there’s sharp debate about his chances this time around. In a reverse image of Virginia, Romney leads the polls by a mere .6 points. But FiveThirtyEight’s analysis finds a state where Obama has struggled to gain traction; right now, they peg his odds of winning Florida at just 35 percent.

Silver’s FL projection may seem a tad pessimistic, given the less than 1 percent lead Romney has in the latest poll. Kromm has more of an insider perspective on NC, where he explains:

…Democrats insist it’s still in play, and point to recent good-news polls [pdf] as proof of revival in a state Obama won by just over 14,000 votes in 2008…The Obama campaign’s strategy in North Carolina has been hard to fathom, perhaps intentionally: On one hand, he famously skipped the state in a recent swing-state tour, and left North Carolina out of a recent round of ad buys. But now Obama’s bumped up advertising in the state again. The campaign claims their focus on “ground game” is the reason Democrats have made up 53 percent of early voters so far; the early voting rate is up 22 percent from 2008.
What do the polls say? Going by averages, Romney has only a 1.6-point advantage in North Carolina. But like Florida, FiveThirtyEight thinks Obama has too much catching up to do; they currently a meager 19 percent chance of winning N.C.

Kromm concludes that “Obama’s prospects may, as of now, appear to have dimmed in the Southern swing states compared to 2008 — but not any worse than they have in other parts of the country.” And it may be that a heroic GOTV effort, particularly in NC’s more progressive “research triangle” and “souls to the polls” mobilizations could offset the small polling leads the GOP may or may not have by election day.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
I am a huge fan of the idea of the Obama campaign closing with putting out an economic plan for the next four years. This is something I have been urging on them not only them but a number of other candidates in tough races for quite a while. I really believe that voters have a deep innate understanding that the economy came off the rails four years ago in a more serious way than usual, that it was due to some big structural problems that had been building for a long time, and that we needed some big, comprehensive ideas to revive the middle class and get the economy back on the right road. I think a great many Americans understand this deep in their bones, far better than the elites in DC who are in too much of a bubble, and are doing too well, to get it. Because of this, voters have been hungry for a serious plan, for big ideas on how to deal with what ails us.
So I am very glad that the plan is the central part of Obama’s final message, and I think it is working: Obama remains ahead in the all-important swing states. I would have opted for a bigger and bolder plan if I were writing it, both for political and policy reasons, but having this plan be at the heart of the closing argument is a great thing. But there are two other pieces to the message that I think should be part of the entire Democratic party’s end game message, and their progressive allies as well. These campaigns have a lot of ads running, and a lot of speeches being given, and there can be more than one element to the message.
The first is to bring the 47% video back to the table. That video came out shortly after the Democrats cleaned the clocks of the Republicans in terms of convention messaging. Voters had moved decisively toward Democrats, in races up and down the ticket, after hearing the two parties contrasting messages of “you’re on your own” vs. “we’re all in this together” — and then the 47% video reinforced and hardened voters’ rejection of Republican values. We had them on the run with a gap that was widening and solidifying. In the aftermath of the first debate, where Romney acted like he was a Democrat and the president failed to make a strong values argument, and worst of all failed to make the contrast between the ideas Romney discussed in the 47% video and Obama’s “we’re all in this together” values, the race returned to the deadlocked election it had been before the conventions. Worse, the Obama team and the many Democratic outside groups doing ads didn’t go back to that values argument which the 47% video invoked, and voters stopped thinking about it. I hope that both the progressive groups doing ads and mail and calls in the final days of the campaign and the Obama campaign make the 47% part of the closing argument.
Here’s the other thing I hope the president, vice president, and Democrats in general do in these closing days: remind voters that this is not just about Romney but about the entire philosophy and values of the Republican Party. One of the things that is absolutely clear in the polling reports I am reading is that the reason the president remains ahead in the swing states is that the brand of the entire Republican party, including Mitt Romney but not exclusively him for sure, is dragging them down. Congressional Republicans, whose intellectual leader is their VP nominee, is the most unpopular institution in American politics.
It’s been interesting to me throughout the campaign that Obama has run pretty much exclusively against Romney and to a lesser extent Ryan, and have never chosen to run against the far more unpopular Republican Congress the way we did in the 1996 Clinton re-elect, and the way Harry Truman did in his 1948 campaign — the last two Democrats to run for re-election with Republicans in control of the House. In our 1996 race, we made the decision early on to make the race not against Bob Dole but far more against Newt Gingrich — we ran far more attack ads against Newt than we ever did against Dole.
There are some differences between this year and ’96, of course. Boehner never made himself into the polarizing figure that Gingrich did early in ’95, and Romney has had far more vulnerabilities (the appalling things he did at Bain Capital and the 47% video among them) to exploit than Dole, who was, well, dull. But I hope we close this campaign by reminding voters that the values of the 47% video and the Republican convention are not just Romney’s values, but his party’s values, and that putting them in charge of the country would be a disaster. It would also be a big boost to all these House and Senate Democrats running with Obama, which they need given the fire hose of nasty ads Karl Rove and his big money boys are spewing out. When George W. Bush ran for re-election in 2004, his campaign made it a point to run on an anti-Democratic party message because they wanted to sweep more Republicans in with them, and it worked. In the closing days of this campaign, Obama should be doing the same.
None of this contradicts promoting the president’s plan. In fact, the contrast between Obama’s pro-middle class, we’re all in this together plan, and the values of a Republican party who believes that 47% of Americans are lazy welchers could not be a stronger end game message.

For those Democrats who have been puzzling over the inability of the Obama campaign to get more traction with white male voters, Brian Montopoli has an excellent post up at CBS News Politics, with the somewhat misleading title, “Will White Men Sink Obama?”
The title is misleading because Montopoli makes it clear that Obama can win; it’s more about the reasons behind the segmentation of the white male vote at this political moment. Montopoli sheds light on the challenge facing Democrats with this still-influential constituency and provides some insightful observations, including:

…While women outvoted men by about 10 million votes in the 2008 presidential election, men still made up 48 percent of the electorate. And white men alone made up more than one third of the electorate – 36 percent – according to national exit polls.
It’s true that whites are slowly shrinking as a portion of the electorate as blacks, Hispanics and Asians grow in influence, which is why you don’t see many news stories about them as a voting bloc. But they still pack a powerful electoral punch. White men, in fact, are providing the biggest drag on the president of any voting bloc as he tries to win another four years in the Oval Office. Even if the president gets his expected 80 percent support from minority voters, he is unlikely to win the election if he can’t win more than one in three white men. And he might not.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll released this week found that white men support Romney over Mr. Obama 65 percent to 32 percent – a 2-to-1 margin. That suggests the president is doing worse among white men then he did in 2008, when exit polls showed he lost white men by a 57 percent to 41 percent margin. The poll also found white men moving away from the president: Romney’s 19-point mid-October lead on handling the economy among the group has risen to 35 points today.

Montopoli quotes Progressive Policy Institute President Will Marshall on the problem:

Many white men, and many, in particular, non-college white men, have not seen that the Democratic economic agenda is in their interest…There’s an account from the left that says these voters have been estranged from Democrats on social issues. And there’s some truth to that. But I also think these voters believe the economic policies of Democrats have benefitted somebody else – not them…

But, as Montopoli points out, there is a strong regional influence on the way the white male vote breaks down:

…A survey released last month by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that Romney led 48 to 35 percent among whites lacking four-year college degrees who are paid by the hour or the job. Yet while Romney led by 40 points among southern working-class whites, the president actually led by eight points among Midwestern working-class whites. The president’s relative strength among whites in the Midwest is the reason a state like Pennsylvania appears likely to remain blue despite a relatively large white population.

As Marshall puts it in Montopoli’s post, “The sense that he’s doing better with white voters in the Midwest is the firewall for Barack Obama…It’s what’s giving him hope that he can win in the Electoral College even if he potentially loses the popular vote.”
Montopoli adds that Romney is weaker in the more unionized midwest, despite his Michigan roots, as a result of his opposition to the auto bailout and Obama’s relative popularity in the region. With white working-class women, however, the situation is a little more complicated. Moreover, adds Monopoli:

…The PRRI study found that while Romney holds a 2-1 advantage among white working class men, the two candidates were tied among white-working class women. David Paul Kuhn, author of “The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma,” reported that Democrats have seen a 25 percent decline in white working-class male support between 1948 and 2004, even as white working-class women held steady.

But the Bush meltdown may have exacerbated the insecurity of white men in particular. “The effect of the 2008 economic collapse has been dubbed a “he-cession” because it disproportionately left men out of work,” adds Montopoli.
Romney, for his part, has been struggling to make inroads with white male working-class voters in the region with repeated references to “the war on coal” and the like. But his campaign seems to be stuck in neutral at the moment.
It does appear that 2012 may be the last election in which the white male vote is a decisive force. As Montopoli concludes, “The silver lining in all this for Democrats: The impact of their disadvantage among white men looks likely to diminish as time goes on.”

At National Journal’s Hotline on Call, Ronald Brownstein and Stephanie Czekalinski discuss the increasing importance of presidential candidate coattails in key races for the U.S. Senate. The authors explain:

This strengthening correlation between preferences in Senate and presidential races is now a key dynamic in the race for control of the upper chamber. (Read related story here.) The share of voters who split their tickets — voting for one party’s candidate for president, and the other’s for Senate — has steadily declined since the 1970s. Though there are exceptions in each cycle, that’s made it more difficult for senators, in effect, to get elected behind enemy lines in states that usually support the other party for president. That means the outcome of the presidential race will cast a huge shadow over the struggle for control of the Senate.
In recent years, it’s become routine for competitive candidates in Senate races to win over 80 percent of the voters who back their party’s presidential nominee. An array of Quinnipiac and Marist Institute/NBC/Wall Street Journal polls this month show virtually every competitive Senate candidate in both parties crossing that threshold in the states that were surveyed.

Brownstein and Czekalinski cite recent polling data showing a tightening relationship between support for President Obama on the one hand and the senate candidacies of Elizabeth Warren in MA, Chris Murphy in CT and Sherrod Brown in OH on the other, along with other Democratic candidates in close races in other states. The same is true for their Republican adversaries. The authors add,

The intensity of these relationships underscores the difficulty facing candidates hoping to swim against the tide of the presidential race in their state. That current is proving a huge obstacle for Republicans McMahon and Brown in states that Obama is on track to win comfortably. Conversely, GOP strategists say, they believe an anti-Obama current will benefit their candidates in North Dakota, Arizona, Montana and Indiana, states with hotly-contested Senate races that Obama is expected to lose.

There are a couple of exceptions. Most notably Claire McCaskill is outperforming the president in MO, owing no doubt in large part to Republican Todd Akin’s insipid remarks about ‘legitimate rape.’ (We may soon see a similar phenomenon in IN, where Republician Richard Mourdock has recently upped the ante on stupid statements about rape.
There are a few other races, where the coattail effect is somewhat in question. But overall, the authors conclude:

The general trajectory toward greater line party voting in Senate races has been extremely powerful. By 2008, the share of voters who backed a presidential candidate of one party and a Senate candidate of the other had dropped to 13 percent – less than half of the 28 percent who reported splitting their ticket during 1972 – the peak year, according to figures from the University of Michigan’s National Election Studies. In 2010, Democrats won the Senate races in nine of the ten states where Obama’s approval rating stood at 48 percent or above-and lost 13 of the 15 where only 47 percent or less of voters approved.

One wild card of 2012 which may actually enhance the coattails relationship is the Democrats’ reportedly more extensive ground game. And who knows, a reverse coattail effect may kick in as a result of the outrageous comments about rape from the likes of Mourdock and Akin, poisoning the GOP brand nationwide among women swing voters.

There’s an encouraging chart for Democrats at Molly Ball’s National Journal post, “Obama’s Ground Game Could Win Him the Election.” It’s just a simple, blue and red bar graphs chart counting campaign field offices in three states, FL, OH and VA. It shows the Obama campaign boasting more than twice as many field offices as the Romney campaign in VA and FL, and more than three times the number of field offices in Ohio. In addition, notes Ball,

…The political operative’s rule of thumb is that organization can increase your share of the vote by 2 percentage points; Obama won the national popular vote [in 2008] by 7 points. One academic study looked at Obama’s edge in field offices and concluded they probably put a couple of extra states in his column, but he would have won without them.
This year is different. The polls are so close that a lively partisan meta-fight has broken out over which side actually has the upper hand going into the final stretch, with Romney claiming momentum is on his side, while Obama clings to slim leads in enough swing states to take the Electoral College. In an election that’s tied in the polls going down to the wire, Obama’s ground game could be crucial.

Ball says that Obama has more than 800 field offices across the U.S., while Romney has about 300 and notes

But the difference isn’t just quantitative, it’s qualitative….These basic characteristics were repeated in all the offices I visited: The Obama offices were devoted almost entirely to the president’s reelection; the Republican offices were devoted almost entirely to local candidates, with little presence for Romney…In a technical sense, the Romney campaign actually does not have a ground game at all. It has handed over that responsibility to the Republican National Committee, which leads a coordinated effort intended to boost candidates from the top of the ticket on down.

Ball quotes Obama’s national field director, Jeremy Bird,

“Community organizing is not a turnkey operation,” Bird says. “You can’t throw up some phone banks in late summer and call that organizing. These are teams that know their turfs — the barber shops, the beauty salons; we’ve got congregation captains in churches. These people know their communities. It’s real, deep community organizing in a way we didn’t have time to do in 2008.”

Ball adds,

Democrats also say they have an edge in early voting in states where it has begun. In Iowa, Nevada, and North Carolina, more Democrats than Republicans had cast ballots as of Monday. In Ohio, more votes had been cast from precincts Obama won in 2008 than from precincts won by McCain. In Florida, more Republicans had cast ballots — absentee balloting is typically a GOP strength in the state, and early voting, which Democrats tend to dominate, has not yet begun. But Florida Democrats note that Republicans’ early advantage is reduced from this point in 2008.
Republicans counter that their partisans are outperforming their share of voter registration in early and absentee voting in many states, and that they are getting out more voters than 2008. But to the Obama campaign, the voting statistics are evidence that they are shaping an electorate to look different than the public polls. “We think that people aren’t always getting it right about who and what this electorate is going to be comprised on Election Day,” Messina said. “We continue to think there’s going to be a higher percentage of minority and young people than some are forecasting.”

Ball says, “what struck me most, in talking to Republicans about their ground game, was the extent to which they admitted they weren’t even playing the game.” She gives Obama Field Director Bird the conclusion of her post: “…In a state-by-state close contest for electoral votes, where it’s deadlocked going in, if you know you expanded the electorate, and you know who those people are, and you have volunteers trained to turn them out — that’s what the ground game is engineered to do.”

At The American Prospect, Jamelle Bouie flags an important post by Matt A. Barreto of Latino Decisions, “Why Pollsters Missed the Latino Vote – 2012 edition,” which notes:

Let’s examine how these faulty Latino numbers create problems with the overall national estimates. After all, Latinos are estimated to comprise 10% off all voters this year. If Latinos are only leaning to Obama 48-42, that +6 edge among 10% of the electorate only contributes a net 0.6 advantage to Obama (4.8 for Obama to 4.2 for Romney). However, if instead Obama is leading 70.3 to 21.9 that +48.4 edge contributes a net 4.8 advantage to Obama (7.0 to 2.2), hence the national polls may be missing as much as 4 full points in Obama’s national numbers. […] If these mistakes are being made nationally where Latinos comprise an estimated 10% of all voters, they are even worse in statewide polls in Nevada, Florida, Colorado and Arizona where Latinos comprise an even larger share of all voters. In Florida Latinos are estimated at 17% of all voters. If you are badly mis-calculating the candidate preference among 17% of the electorate (that’s 1 out of every 6 voters), then the entire statewide estimates are wrong.

As Bouie concludes, “The polls might be underestimating Obama’s level of support, due to small and unrepresentative samples of Latino and African American voters. If that’s the case, then Obama’s position is much stronger than it looks.” Barreto doesn’t speculate on the motives behind the Latino undersampling. But it would be quite a stretch to credit these pollsters with honest ignorance about the Latino demographic. The more likely case is that they are distorting their samples to produce a more competitive race — or worse.

The following video clip of former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s The War Room commentary is cross-posted from Current TV:

Jonathan Chait’s New York Magazine post “Romney Says He’s Winning — It’s a Bluff” explains the GOP nominee’s strategy for the final two weeks of the campaign. As Chait explains:

In recent days, the vibe emanating from Mitt Romney’s campaign has grown downright giddy. Despite a lack of any evident positive momentum over the last week — indeed, in the face of a slight decline from its post-Denver high — the Romney camp is suddenly bursting with talk that it will not only win but win handily. (“We’re going to win,” said one of the former Massachusetts governor’s closest advisers. “Seriously, 305 electoral votes.”)
This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Over the last week, Romney’s campaign has orchestrated a series of high-profile gambits in order to feed its momentum narrative. Last week, for instance, Romney’s campaign blared out the news that it was pulling resources out of North Carolina. The battleground was shifting! Romney on the offensive! On closer inspection, it turned out that Romney was shifting exactly one staffer. It is true that Romney leads in North Carolina, and it is probably his most favorable battleground state. But the decision to have a staffer move out of state, with a marching band and sound trucks in tow to spread the news far and wide, signals a deliberate strategy to create a narrative.

Chait goes on to expose Romney’s pretensions of re-igniting his Pennsylvania campaign, which involve lots of unconvincing noise but no new investment of campaign resources. Chait notes that Karl Rove invoked similar cheat-beating strategy in 2000, sending President Bush into California to pretend like he had an actual chance to win the state, and some reporters fell for it.
Chait provides a reality check, noting that Obama still leads in polling averages, as well as all credible estimates of the electoral college breakdown. The Romney campaign bluster continues, nonetheless. Yet even though Obama’s lead is narrow, Chait concludes that “the widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.”
Not all of the press is so easily suckered. But the meme will get some play from the pro-Republican media, more gullible reporters and those who are willing to cherry-pick polls to portray a more dramatic finish. The challenge for Democrats, however, remains unchanged — the most energetic closing weeks GOTV effort ever mobilized.