2012 Presidential Election, Swing State | featured news

Less than a week before Election Day, President Barack Obama holds a statistically significant lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the battleground of Iowa, while the two candidates are locked in tight races in New Hampshire and Wisconsin.

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.

...The ad also comes on the heels of Mitt Romney’s mistaken claim in a speech last week that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China — a statement immediately denied by the auto manufacturer. Yet the story apparently was too good for Romney to give up, because the ad repeats the claim, tweaked slightly to make it more accurate.

President Barack Obama is poised to eke out a victory in the race for the 270 electoral votes needed to win re-election, having beaten back Republican Mitt Romney's attempts to convert momentum from the debates into support in all-important Ohio, according to an Associated Press analysis a week before Election Day....

With the presidential contest in Virginia teetering on a knife's edge, Mitt Romney is counting on the economic concerns of suburban women to lock up a state that's almost a must-carry for him. Joanie Smerdzinski, 34, is one of them. She voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and still finds him more likable than his Republican rival. "I mean, would I want to hang out with Romney? No," said the political independent, who also disagrees with Romney's opposition to same-sex marriage.

President Obama is clinging to a slender, four-point lead over Republican Mitt Romney in Virginia, as both sides ramp up already aggressive campaigns in the crucial battleground state, according to a new Washington Post poll.

Under the bright lights of a high school football field in Defiance, Ohio, Mitt Romney's opposition to the 2009 auto bailout reared its head again as a campaign issue that could help decide the result of this critical swing state.

Retiree Robert Stevens says he turns off the television when the attack ads appear, and he hangs up the phone when it's a presidential campaign calling. At this point, he says, "I don't know who I am going to vote for."

New polls released on Wednesday and Thursday continue to show President Barack Obama holding narrow leads in a handful of critical battleground states, but running within a whisker of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney nationwide.

With the debates behind them, President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney launched themselves Tuesday into a final sprint across the half a dozen or so states that will probably decide which of the two claims the White House on Nov. 6.