Ohio, Mitt Romney | featured news

A new Fox News poll shows President Obama leading Mitt Romney in three key states: Ohio, Florida and Virginia. The president leads by 7 percentage points in both Ohio (49%-42%) and Virginia (50%-43%), Fox says. In Florida -- where Obama campaigns today --- he leads Romney, 49%-44%.

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.

Why the battle to take credit for Ohio’s ever-so-slightly above-average economy could swing the presidential election...While most of the debate nationally still revolves around why the economy remains so pathetic, there are several pivotal states — Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia — where things are slowly turning around.

President Obama leads Mitt Romney in Ohio while the two candidates are neck-and-neck in Florida and Wisconsin, according to a new poll of the three swing states. The polling by Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News shows the race tightening in Florida and Wisconsin. Romney is getting a small boost in these states from his selection of Rep. Paul Ryan, who hails from Wisconsin.

These days, President Obama is running as much against Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney. Having used the Medicare issue against Romney and his running mate Ryan -- who is chairman of the House Budget Committee -- Obama today zeroed in on education funding. "Putting a college education within reach for working families just doesn't seem to be a big priority for my opponent," Obama told supporters today in Columbus, Ohio.

Mitt Romney wrongly suggests the Obama campaign is trying to "undermine" the voting rights of military members through a lawsuit filed in Ohio. The suit seeks to block state legislation that limited early voting times for nonmilitary members; it doesn't seek to impose restrictions on service members.

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, 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 has some simple advice for students who want to start their own business: Just borrow money from your parents. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee made the suggestion Friday during a pit stop at Otterbein University in Ohio.