Iowa, Mitt Romney | featured news

President Obama sought to shore up his standing in Midwestern states, including Iowa and Wisconsin, while Mitt Romney fought to secure critical states like Florida and Virginia.

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.

A month before the closing arguments of a campaign traditionally would be made, a steady stream of voters walked into election offices across Iowa on Thursday to cast their ballots.

If there were any questions about whether Paul Ryan would spark strong reactions as Republican Mitt Romney’s newly-picked running mate, they were answered today amid the Jumbo Corn Dog stands and funnel cake carts of the Iowa State Fair.

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.

Returning to the state that launched Barack Obama’s path to the presidency, Mitt Romney went on offense Tuesday, accusing his rival of carelessly driving the country into "a financial crisis of both debt and spending that threaten what it means to be an American."

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.

In the closest finish in the history of the Iowa caucuses, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum were locked in a virtual dead heat in the first battle for the Republican presidential nomination... Ron Paul, nearly doubling his Iowa vote from 2008, was a close third.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who led Iowa and national polls in November, said Monday he did not expect to win Tuesday's Iowa caucuses, but will declare victory because he has survived an onslaught of negative advertising.