I am always struck when Yahoo!, on its home page, links a story beneficial to Mitt Romney, this time offering a data point similar to observations made by prominent pundits:

“Romney’s message,” report Connie Cass and Jennifer Agiesta

a vote for Obama is a vote for more gridlock — seems to be getting through. An Associated Press-GfK poll shows that almost half of likely voters — some 47 percent — think the Republican challenger would be better at ending the logjam Thirty-seven percent say Obama would.

37%? That’s far fewer than the percentage supporting the president.  It seems even a good chunk of Obama’s supporters know that lacks the skills he, in his last campaign, claimed to possess. (more…)

What if say, President Bush had given the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a prominent evangelical who said that Jews are going to hell? You think it might get some coverage in the legacy media?

In my previous post, I noted that among the many stories our legacy media seem to be downplaying if not out right ignoring is one about Rev. Joseph Lowery, the man “who gave Obama’s inaugural benediction“.  At “a weekend rally in central Georgia“, the pastor said

 . . . that the “level and hatred and bitterness” borne of this election had made him a believer that whites were going to hell.

Lowery said, according to the Monroe County Reporter, it was the same belief he held at the height of the civil rights movement. Eventually he mellowed, believing that not all whites, rather only “most,” would get their brimstone comeuppance.

“Now,” the local newsweekly reported, “he is back to where he was.”

Earlier this afternoon, when perusing Instapundit, I noticed how many stories Glenn Reynolds and his co-bloggers were covering that were both damaging to President Obama and have been all but ignored by the legacy media.

In the interest of making people aware of these stories, I share the links below.  Can you imagine the coverage these stories would get if they were about Republicans or a Republican president?

Commenting on one of my posts about newspaper endorsements, Rattlesnake, a Canadian, acknowledged that he’s

. . . kind of confused over the newspaper endorsements. Does anyone really care what some newspaper has to say? I recognize that these endorsements are a good sign for Romney, but would it be more accurate to say that this is an effect of the candidates’ performance rather than something that will have any influence, or not?

Yesterday, Ed Morrissey asked a similar question, wondering if newspaper endorsements matter.

They do, I have argue, “do sometimes serve as a barometer of trends in public opinion” as Ace explained in excerpting and analyzing the The Nashua (NH) Telegraph’s endorsement this year of Mitt Romney after backing Barack Obama in 2008:

I’ve written earlier that these flips in newspaper endorsements are somewhat helpful for Romney, as a direct matter, as they will tend to sway some undecided voters.

But they’re also important indirectly as proxies for, as the Telegraph says, the “conversations taking place in kitchens and living rooms across America.” Editorial staffs aren’t kitchens and living rooms, of course– but they’re actually more liberal, and more likely to buy into Obama’s brand of progressivism than most families talking about the question.

The Telegraph editors had compared their “spirited debate” about the endorsement to those very conversations.  If this group of editors decided to switch from supporting Obama in 2008 to endorsing Romney in 2012, then perhaps families across the country may be reaching similar decisions when they wrestle between doubling down on the man they backed four years and the man who represents real change.

ADDENDUM:  Ed links an Investor’s Business Daily editorial finding that “if those major metro dailies that have announced their picks, more than one in five that had previously backed Obama are now pushing Romney, according to a tally by the American Presidency Project.”  One in five have flipped from Obama to Romney. . . . that’s 20%!

Parking a car with these stickers in West Hollywood:

Readers of this blog know that I have regularly posted about polls showing Mitt Romney enjoying a sizable advantage among independent voters — even when he was running behind President Obama in national surveys.

I believe that this is significant because the candidate who wins the independent vote tends also to win the election.  Ace summarizes  why the independent vote is particularly significant swing states:

It’s very simple: Swing states are swing states because neither party has much of a lead in the states. The outcome of any election, then, depends heavily on which way Independents vote.

. . . .

Any state in which Obama loses Independents by six, eight, or ten points but somehow — as these polls claims – wins the state anyway are not “swing states,” almost by definition.

No wonder Ace cried foul on the slew of surveys from Quinnippiac this morning.  They all found Obama losing independents, sometimes by lopsided margins (21 points in the Old Dominion).  In California, a loss of that magnitude would likely only reduce Obama’s margin of victory to the single digits, but in a state with the parties at – or near – parity that advantage could make all the difference.

Th “swing” states, however, have a far greater percentage of Republicans (percentage-wise) than does the once-Golden State.  That is why, as Jennifer Rubin, reports, the independent vote cheers team Romney:

[One] “indisputable and near universal polling fact in the presidential race: Mitt Romney is winning big among independent. The conservative polling and research firm Resurgent Republic released its final batch of polling, finding Romney leads President Obama among Independents by a 51 to 39 percent margin nationally. By comparison George W. Bush won independents by 2 points in 2000 and lost independents by one point in 2004.

Emphasis added.

We’ve already reported on Minnesota being in play, but it now appears that the Land of Enchantment may also be up for grabs. The Hill reports:

Restore Our Future, a super-PAC backing Mitt Romney, is launching ads in Minnesota and New Mexico for the final week of the presidential campaign.

The buys are significant: $1.1 million in Minnesota and $700,000 in inexpensive New Mexico.

UPDATE: Michael Barone concludes his report of a conference call with team Romney with an upbeat assessment of where the campaign is moving:

the fact that their side and the other side are both spending money in states almost everyone assumed were safe for the other side speaks even more eloquently about where we are in this election.

Earlier today, at Instapundit, Sarah Hoyt linked a post which showed how Quinnipiac weighted their latest Ohio poll to create a bigger Democratic advantage than the sample provided.  ”Its partisan split“, blogs Bryan Preston, “skews much too far to the left:”

So, I tallied the raw totals (unweighted frequency above) and came up with a sample size of 1,110. This means, the Republican total of 343 represents 30.9% of the sample, the Democrat 35.7%. Thanks to Quinnipiac’s ratings, suddenly presto-chango a D+4.7% sample becomes D+8 sample, pushing the race 3.2 points toward the president’s party.

It seems that the raw numbers only had Obama up by a point.  Guess Quinnipiac just didn’t like that result.

Methinks the folks at Quinnipiac were trying to get the Democrat to 50–which is what their weighted survey showed.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHT:  Why does Quinnipiac forecast a large Democratic advantage this fall than in 2008?

UPDATE:  Ace can’t really take this set of polls seriously, given that it “has Romney up 21 points with Independents in Virginia but still has Obama winning!”

FROM THE COMMENTS:  Kurt writes that, “Of course we all know why they did it–so as not to depress turnout!”

Can you imagine what will happen if Ohio or Pennsylvania are decided early for Romney? If that were to happen, then some of the states further west might change, too.

Democrats must be happy with the latest CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac surveys which show Obama up in three swing states.  Conservative bloggers have been quick to cite the partisan skew of those surveys, with each anticipating a greater Democratic edge than in 2008.

But, despite this skew, each survey shows greater Republican enthusiasm in each state, up 16 points over the Democrats in Florida, 14 in Ohio and 7 in Virginia.  In each state, Republican enthusiasm has increased since the previous survey, causing Stacy McCain to ask,

How is it that Republicans report greater voting enthusiasm by such large margins, and yet are underrepresented in the poll’s sample? It makes no sense.

(H/t:  Reader Kurt.)  ”In all three states,” Ed Morrissey concludes, Obama has

. . . lost ground by double digits in the gap with independents.  In all three states, Republican enthusiasm is significantly higher than Democratic enthusiasm.  I’d say that the only possible way Obama could be leading under those circumstances is to seriously undercount Republicans.

GOP enthusiasm up.  Independents swinging toward Mitt Romney.   The internals of these polls certainly suggest an electorate favoring the Republicans.

The Naked Cowboy is not the only New York cultural presence to back Mitt Romney.  David Brooks signaled yesterday that hed  the former Massachusetts governor to the incumbent, though with considerably less enthusiasm — and for process reasons rather than philosophical ones:

If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform. Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama. He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans. He’s more likely to get big stuff done

Brooks spends as much time imagining the future under the leadership of the man whose “perfectly creased pant“ once so enchanted him as he does imagining a Romney administration.  This column is significant for a variety of reasons, notably that Brooks once gushed over Obama, but now has a better picture of the man:

By running such a negative presidential campaign, Obama has won no mandate for a Grand Bargain. Obama himself is not going to suddenly turn into a master legislative craftsman on the order of Lyndon Johnson.

Once again, a pundit acknowledges that Obama is not really up to the business of governing.  That said, Brooks is overly generous in imagining how Obama would go about avoiding the fiscal cliff — and too harsh on the GOP.

But, the columnist is well-liked by a good number of urban intellectuals*; this column may serve to give the urban bourgeoisie (particularly the bohemians among them) who have becoming increasingly aware of Obama’s failures”permission” to vote for Mitt Romney.

* (more…)

Council Submissions

• The Noisy Room – Presidential Depraved Indifference
• The Political Commentator – A must read psychological analysis of Barack Obama!
• The Colossus of Rhodey – Delusion
• The Independent Sentinel – What Four More Years of Obamacracy Will Look Like Pt. I
• Joshuapundit-Obama Agonistes: The Fiction Cracks On Benghazi
• Simply Jews – Speculating on Iran-Israel nuclear conflict: this way insanity waits
• GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Little Satan”s Sudan Raid
• Bookworm Room – Found it on Facebook: Jon Stewart and the problem with modern political discourse
• The Right Planet – Torches And Pitchforks
• The Razor – Ending Radio Silence
• VA Right! - The (Political) Storm of the Century
• The Glittering Eye -Is It Objective?
• Gay Patriot – The real problem with Obama’s 2008 race speech
• Rhymes With Right – NYT Castle Doctrine Article Exposes Liberal Hypocrisy
• The Mellow Jihadi – Malala Yousufzai, the Martin Luther King Jr of Pakistan (more…)

Reader Kurt passes on a link which showing this Manhattan sensation to be of a mind with the Gipper’s (political ideals):

“I believe in a small, decentralized, fiscally responsible federal government,” [}Robert Burck, aka the guy who sings and prances around in his underwear in New York City’s Times Square"] told New York’s CBS affiliate. ”I believe in an economy with free market principals, and I believe in the strongest national defense on Earth. And those are the antithesis of all the things Obama is doing.”

He’s already “filed his vote for Romney in the all-important state of Ohio.”

Saying that he is “by nature an entrepreneur and a small businessman” who’s been successful and he sees “this country as going kind of in the opposite direction of that.”

He’s not the only one.