Florida, Virginia | featured news

President Obama sought to shore up his standing in Midwestern states, including Iowa and Wisconsin, while Mitt Romney fought to secure critical states like Florida and Virginia.

People in Florida, Virginia and Indiana have gotten calls falsely telling them they can vote early by phone and don't need to go to a polling place. In suburban Broward County, Fla., a handful of elderly voters who requested absentee ballots say they were visited by unknown people claiming to be authorized to collecttheballots.

President Obama retains a lead in Ohio, but his race with Republican Mitt Romney has tightened in the key states of Florida and Virginia, says a new poll. Obama leads Romney 51%-43% in Ohio, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist College Poll. The two candidate are locked in a statistical tie in Florida, where Obama leads 47%-46%, and in Virginia, where the president is ahead 48%-46%.

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%.

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.

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.

Last week's election was bad for Democrats. The next one could be worse. Senate Democrats running in 2012 will be trying to hold their jobs in states where Republicans just scored major congressional and gubernatorial victories - Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Virginia.