Resistance is futile.

Or, in other words: Just give in already to the power of the all-knowing and all-powerful bureaucracy. Trust us. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that ObamaCare’s Medicaid mandate (requiring that states expand their programs and provide specified health care to all citizens whose income falls below a certain threshold, or else face losing all [...]

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Here we go.

Free advice, take it or leave it: Don’t start obsessing about Ohio until we have a better sense of what’s happening in Virginia. Everyone’s going to go crazy when the OH early voting totals are revealed sometime after 7:30, as that’ll be the first strong sign of whether Romney’s overperforming or not. But there’s a [...]

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Dateline: Ohio

Bowling Green, a town of 30,000, was carved out of the mucky wetlands they call the Great Black Swamp— a remnant of an ancient glacier that made the shores of Lake Eerie one of the best places to get a wagon wheel stuck in the 1800s. A nearby oil discovery brought money to the farming [...]

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Oh my.

Update: The data is still up at the Gannett site, but they’ve pulled the link from the front page.  Justin Higgins says that OH won’t release EV data separately: @edmorrissey Ohio doesn’t report early results until the polls close. — Justin Higgins (@JustinHiggins) November 6, 2012 Original post follows, but if this turns out to [...]

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270.

What follows will be old hat to most readers, who’ve been wargaming paths to 270 for six months now, but I’m thinking it might be useful to casual readers who are stopping by tonight and tomorrow because their interest in the election is peaking. Simple question: Which states does Romney need to win to clinch [...]

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Uh oh.

In their bid to lock down Ohio and keep Michigan in the blue, the Obama campaign has touted few narratives quite as keenly as the “Obama saved the American auto industry with his bailouts and has since saved/created countless America manufacturing jobs” narrative, while actively criticizing Mitt Romney for what they deceptively characterize as a [...]

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Big finish.

I like it, especially the Pennsylvania visit. Even if he thinks PA’s a longshot, one more appearance can’t hurt and delivering an E-Day pep talk to Republicans in a big blue state that’s suddenly in play is a sweet morale booster for GOPers nationally. If anything, I wish he had time to squeeze in a [...]

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Endgame.

Surprised to see neither O nor Mitt scheduling any last-minute face time on the Sunday shows. Maybe it’s in the works and hasn’t been announced yet. If not, then the heaviest GOP hitter on tap is Rob Portman, who’ll give Ohio one last nudge in the right direction. For the Democrats it’ll be the Axelrod [...]

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"Revenge."

“Speaking to an audience, he said, you know voting is the best revenge,” said Romney. “He told his supporters, voting for revenge. Vote for revenge? “Let me tell you what I’d like to tell you: Vote for love of country,” he said. “It is time we lead America to a better place.” *** Asked about [...]

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It's come to this. Again.

If you can’t beat ‘em, NAB ‘EM! Perrysburg police arrested four Toledo area men early Friday morning on charges of stealing Mitt Romney campaign signs in Wood and Lucas counties in Northwest Ohio. The signs were found in a pickup truck owned by Sheet Metal Workers International, Union Local 33 in Parma, according to the [...]

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Parting shots.

ICYMI, on the campaign trail on Ohio on Friday, the president had just a few choice words about why people should get out and vote in response to rally-goers booing at the mention of Mitt Romney. I won’t even waste a facepalm on this swing-and-a-miss, but I have to wonder: What, exactly, was the president [...]

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Portents

We’re coming down to the wire in the 2012 election, and being a presidential year most eyes are trained on the race to the finish between Mitt Romney and President Obama. But control of both chambers in the legislative branch are on the line as well, and as we all know, Congress can do a [...]

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Big finish.

After more than a year of campaigning, endless political advertisements, two conventions and four debates, the presidential election is almost over. The big decision of 2012 will soon be in the hands of the voters. The choice Americans make will shape great things, historic things, and those will determine the most important and intimate aspects [...]

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Proud corporatist.

BOWLING GREEN, OH —On the airwaves in Ohio, brought to you by the party that reminds you at every turn how deeply concerned it is about corporatism: While furrowing their brows over how involvement by corporations is hastening the fall of our election system, Democrats bring you a Senate ad that’s even more cloying and [...]

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Big red.

I can’t find an electoral-vote prediction from him in 2008 but on October 30th of that year he acknowledged that an Obama victory was “likely but not quite certain.” Karl Rove did, however, make an EV prediction: Obama 338, McCain 200. This year Rove has Romney winning at least 279 electoral votes and Barone has [...]

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"I'm honored to be in Pennsylvania." "OHIO!"

PERRYSBURG, OH— Pulling into the parking lot at Owens Community College in Perrysburg Thursday, I briefly wondered if I was in the right spot. I cruised through a roundabout, in the shadow of a painted silo and a giant windmill— the tableau of rural past and green energy future no doubt a deliberate backdrop for [...]

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Oh my.

Lefties are snarking on Twitter that McCain did some late campaigning in Pennsylvania too and it worked out smashingly for him. Right, but McCain was down nearly seven points nationally at the time. There was little opportunity cost to playing a longshot instead of spending a few extra hours in a swing state because there [...]

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Oh my.

A shot of optimism after a day of eeyorish state polls. How does Rove arrive at this result when eight of the last nine Ohio surveys have O ahead? In two steps: (1) He clearly trusts the national data over the state data, and (2) he cites historical numbers showing that incumbents recently have tended [...]

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... with D+8, D+7, D+8 samples.

We’re down to the final week of the election, where we’d normally expect to see pollsters fine-tuning their samples in order to get the most predictive survey results ahead of the election.  It’s refreshing, therefore, to see the CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac partnership decide to buck that trend and stick with consistency.  Their polls in the most hotly [...]

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Expanding the map.

Via Mark Halperin and Jim Geraghty, who points out that Detroit’s TV market doesn’t reach Ohio. This is all about defending Michigan, which would have seemed crazy a month ago but now, in a world where The One is under 50 percent in Oregon, makes lots of sense. This is, after all, a state capable [...]

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Flashback.

Two Mondays before Election Day in 2008, Barack Obama was on stage at the Canton Memorial Civic Center in Ohio making his closing argument. “It is time, Canton, to try something new. The question of this election is not are you better off than you were four years ago. We all know the answer to [...]

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Well, cry me a river.

And so the Jeep/China/offshoring drama continues. Team Obama was up in arms over the weekend because, they claimed, a new Mitt Romney ad perpetuates a false attack by pointing out that erstwhile-bailout-recipient Chrysler is considering building new Jeep production facilities in China. The only thing is, while Romney did misspeak while on the stump last [...]

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Oof.

President Obama has been hitting hard on the ostensible success of his taxpayer-funded bailouts of General Motors and Chrysler in any way he can, touting the supposedly approaching comeback of American manufacturing due to his skillful “I bet on American workers” policies and bloviating about how that cold-hearted Mitt Romney would’ve simply let the American [...]

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Momentum?

Has the Ohio deadlock started to break apart?  Rasmussen’s latest survey in Ohio shows Mitt Romney taking a small edge over Barack Obama, 50/48, for his first lead in the Buckeye State: The race for Ohio’s Electoral College votes remains very close, but now Mitt Romney now has a two-point advantage. The latest Rasmussen Reports [...]

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