North Carolina, Mitt Romney | featured news

Mitt Romney is showing confidence about his standing in North Carolina and shifting campaign staff to other battleground states. "With the increasingly widening polls in North Carolina, we will continue to allocate resources, including key senior staff, to other states," Romney spokesman Michael Levoff told The News & Observer in Raleigh.

"We've had the old Romney-Ryan plan before - the top-down, give wealthier folks more tax breaks and somehow that's going to trickle down - it didn't work, it led to this economic disaster that the president inherited. We tried that, it failed, the Obama plan is much better for North Carolina," Dem. Rep. Jennifer Weiss, of Wake County, said.

During a recent weekend in North Carolina, Tim Pawlenty did what he has been doing over the past year for Mitt Romney: He drove himself non-stop. In one town, he discussed the economy and jobs with a group of parents at an ice rink. Before the event ended, the former high school junior varsity hockey player had taken to the ice to give children a few skating tips. Soon, he was off again. He helped to open a Republican office in Raleigh, turning fiery, using the occasion to hammer President Obama and show off his combative skills: “I’m tired of hearing his teleprompter speeches and no results. . . . Those words, they don’t put gas in our cars, do they?”

Democratic President Barack Obama holds a narrow lead over Republican Mitt Romney in North Carolina, according to a new poll. Obama has a 49-46 percent lead over Romney, according to a survey by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning firm based in Raleigh. The lead is within the margin of error.

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.

Republican front-runner Mitt Romney defended his leadership on Thursday of a private equity firm at the center of a raging campaign battle in South Carolina over whether while its chief executive he was a job killer.