2012 Presidential Election | featured news

Candy Crowley, the moderator for Tuesday’s second presidential debate, isn’t backing down. The CNN reporter and host said Monday that she intends to take an active part in the town-hall-style debate, despite efforts by the campaigns of President Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney to curtail her role.

The election is still three weeks away, but first lady Michelle Obama voted for the president on Monday. "The president and first lady are making history by voting early in person and by mail in order to promote the ease, convenience, and importance of voting," the Obama campaign said in a press release on Monday.

For candidates who want to prepare for every possible question that could be thrown at them, the format for Tuesday night's presidential debate is slightly terrifying: It is a town hall-style debate, which means that the questions come from uncommitted voters. When political reporters are posing the questions, the candidates usually have a good idea what to expect. But when members of the public get the chance to weigh in, the candidates can sometimes face curve balls that leave them flummoxed.

The Obama campaign appears to be taking nearly every opportunity ahead of the second presidential debate to tell Americans what to expect from President Obama, while the Romney camp has remained essentially mum – a sharp contrast to the days before the first debate when the parallel strategy was to lower expectations.

The U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania has become "too close to call" three weeks before the election, while President Barack Obama's lead in the state has slipped from 12 to 4 percentage points after a disappointing debate performance, a Quinnipiac poll said on Tuesday.

...One thing is clear, however: Obama's organization - which his campaign says involves hundreds of thousands of people nationwide - reflects the power of incumbency. Some of Obama's local offices never closed after the historic 2008 election that made him the nation's first black president. As a result, Obama is viewed even by some Republicans as having an advantage in on-the-ground organization, the trench-warfare part of a national campaign.

President Barack Obama retained a slim lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll on Monday, as he appeared to have stemmed the bleeding from his poor first debate.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's campaign says it raised $170.4 million in September. The figure brings Romney's fundraising effort slightly behind President Barack Obama's $181 million haul for the month. It leaves Romney, the Republican Party and related groups with $191 million in the bank to spend during the final full month of the campaign.

The father of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was killed in an attack on the consulate in Libya last month, says his son's death shouldn't be made into a political football in the presidential race.

Nearly six in 10 Medicare recipients would pay higher premiums under a hypothetical privatized system, with wide regional differences leading to big hikes in some states and counties, a study released Monday finds.