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Despite several visits from President Obama and Mitt Romney since then, a barrage of ads and the state’s recent mass shooting, Obama’s lead remains essentially unchanged at 49 percent to 43 percent.

The main super PAC helping President Obama is out with an emotional ad today slamming Mitt Romney's business record, featuring an ex-steelworker talking about his wife's death after the couple lost their health insurance.

Candidates may raise the unprecedented sums of political cash being funneled through Super PACs this year, and media strategists may decide how to spend them – but the people who actually wind up pocketing much of the money are America's television broadcasters. Since the Supreme Court voided limits on political donations in Citizens United, more money than ever is being devoted to negative TV ads. Industry analysts predict that upwards of $3 billion will be spent on political advertising this year – a surge of more than $500 million over 2008.

President Obama's latest television ad hits Mitt Romney over his tax cut plans, saying they will lead to tax hikes for the middle class.

“We tried our plan — and it worked. That’s the difference. That’s the choice in this election. That’s why I’m running for a second term.” ...In any case, the Romney campaign clearly ripped these words out of context, leaving them untethered from their original meaning — in order to score political points in a highly misleading way. Obama was not talking about today’s economy, but about different philosophies of taxation.

Restore Our Future, the super PAC backing Mitt Romney, released a new radio ad Friday knocking President Barack Obama for his handling of the economy and calling into question the Obama campaign's repeated attacks on Romney and Bain Capital. The new spot, titled "Imagine," is part of a $1 million radio ad campaign and will air from July 27 to Aug. 2 across swing states Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

A Democratic super PAC that used footage from the 2002 Olympics to slam Mitt Romney has taken down a Web video at the request of the U.S. Olympic Committee and will not run a related TV ad.

The Conservative Majority Fund PAC's spot looks like a cheaply produced infomercial, except instead of selling gadgets, it's pushing the notion that Obama is hiding something dark about his past. It includes all of the boilerplate fringe theories: Questions about Bill Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, characters in the president's book, his college records, his social security number, and of course, his birth certificate, all make an appearance.

This evening, one of the more influential national polls, from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, will release its latest findings. If it reports some of the same weakness for Obama as the recent New York Times-CBS News poll did, we can conclude the race has shifted in Romney's favor.

Senate Republicans blocked Democratic-backed legislation requiring organizations pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign ads to disclose their top donors and the amounts they spend.