New Hampshire, Iowa | featured news

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.

In a campaign fast growing nasty, the Republican National Committee is trying a gentler approach... Several Republicans who weren't involved in making the ad say a softer approach may be essential to the effort to defeat Obama in November, given polls showing him with strong personal favorability ratings. The ad is airing in Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa.

While nationally the two rivals are locked in a dead heat, in 12 expected battleground states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin — Obama leads by eight points in the survey.

President Obama, Republican challenger Mitt Romney, and their allies have already spent $87 million on TV ads, the Associated Press reports -- most of it in nine battleground states. They are, not surprisingly, nine toss-up states that will likely decide the election: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire.

Mitt Romney faced attacks from both sides after squeaking a record narrow victory in Iowa, with New Hampshire's leading newspaper Thursday urging Republicans to back his rival Newt Gingrich and President Barack Obama's re-election campaign training its sights on him.

It was standing room only as Mitt Romney briefly took time out from Iowa to campaign in Republican strongholds in New Hampshire, where he holds a wide lead approaching the state's first-in-the-nation primary.

The polls of the two earliest states in the presidential nominating contest both show significant progress for Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, who has moved up about 20 points in each state since October.

The Iowa caucuses will be Jan. 3, leaving New Hampshire as the last state to announce its primary.

Republican candidates have been test-driving themes and previewing attack lines online for months, foreshadowing the TV ad war that's all but certain to start soon in Iowa, New Hampshire and other early voting states.

Take a breather, Iowa and New Hampshire. Florida is about to get into the Republican presidential race - big-time. Florida is about to get into the Republican presidential race big time, starting with a televised debate Monday in Tampa and ending with an early primary in 2012 that conceivably could wrap up the nomination.