2012 Presidential Election | featured news

Stumping in western Virginia on Thursday, Mitt Romney resumed his full-throated critique of President Barack Obama, mocking the president's proposed new cabinet position to oversee businesses' needs and predicting four more years of a stagnant economy should the incumbent be re-elected.

... And for all his shortcomings, Mr Obama has dragged America’s economy back from the brink of disaster, and has made a decent fist of foreign policy. So this newspaper would stick with the devil it knows, and re-elect him.

After three days of tending to storm business, President Obama gets back on the campaign trail Thursday with plans to offer a closing argument focused on middle-class security.

Less than a week before Election Day, President Barack Obama holds a statistically significant lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the battleground of Iowa, while the two candidates are locked in tight races in New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

Gallup suggests voter turnout for the presidential election will be lower than in 2004 and 2008. In polling taken before superstorm Sandy hit, Gallup says registered voters were giving less thought to the election and saying they were less likely to vote in the contest between President Obama and Mitt Romney.

Last year, during one of the GOP presidential debates, Romney seemed to indicate that he wanted to cut or even privatize the Federal Emergency Management Agency. At the time, his comments barely made a ripple. Now, with FEMA leading the rescue efforts after Hurricane Sandy, the question of what Romney would do with the agency if he were to become president suddenly seems a lot more salient. And suddenly Romney doesn’t want to talk about it, presumably because the prospect of gutting the budget for first responders or pushing them into the private sector wouldn’t be very popular when they are breaking their backs to help people after the hurricane.

The U.S. presidential race remains a dead heat one week before Election Day but most Americans think President Barack Obama will defeat Republican Mitt Romney, according to a Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll released on Tuesday.

People in Florida, Virginia and Indiana have gotten calls falsely telling them they can vote early by phone and don't need to go to a polling place. In suburban Broward County, Fla., a handful of elderly voters who requested absentee ballots say they were visited by unknown people claiming to be authorized to collecttheballots.

...The ad also comes on the heels of Mitt Romney’s mistaken claim in a speech last week that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China — a statement immediately denied by the auto manufacturer. Yet the story apparently was too good for Romney to give up, because the ad repeats the claim, tweaked slightly to make it more accurate.

There has never been anything like it in modern American history, a natural disaster so massive and so close to election day, and for all their minutely-plotted moves there was nothing for the candidates and their strategists to do but improvise and hope for the best.