2012 Presidential Election, Battleground State | featured news

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede. The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor.

Some better poll news for Mitt Romney today, as a new survey puts him in a near-dead heat with President Obama. The president has 48%, while Romney has 47%, well within the margin of error, according to the Politico-George Washington University Battleground Poll.

The battle for presidential votes in the key state of Ohio is heading to court. President Obama's campaign has sued the state of Ohio over new rules for early voting designed to benefit members of the military, saying the extra hours should be available to all voters.

President Barack Obama has the edge over Mitt Romney in three key battleground states in large part because voters find him more likable than the Republican challenger, a poll released on Wednesday found.

Bolstered by a new poll that shows him leading in Ohio and two other battleground states, President Barack Obama on Wednesday made his ninth campaign trip this year to the Buckeye State to attack Republican rival Mitt Romney's tax plan as unfair to middle-class Americans.

Citing a poll conducted by Global Strategy Group and Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group in the battleground states of Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida, Priorities USA claimed that more voters say Romney’s experience at Bain makes them less likely to vote for him, 37% to 27%. Claiming that its own anti-Bain ads are working, Priorities USA pointed out that in the 11 markets they’ve advertised in within those five states, Obama leads Romney by eight points (49% to 41%) compared with a three-point lead in those without the ads (46% to 43%).

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’s decision to extend administrative relief to an estimated 800,000 young illegal immigrants has won favor with Latino voters in key battleground states, according to a new poll.

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.