Barack Obama re-election campaign received a significant boost on Wednesday as two new polls showed him pulling ahead of Mitt Romney, his Republican challenger, in the key battleground states that will decide November's general election.
The Quinnipiac results showed Mr Obama leading by a comfortable nine points in Ohio
Despite a turbulent month for Mr Obama,
battered by disappointing jobs numbers and a high-profile Republican
by-election victory in Wisconsin, the president was found to have
established an eight-point lead in 12 key swing states, according to a
poll by NBC and The Wall Street Journal.
The
numbers, which were supported by the results of a Quinnipiac University
poll, make grim reading for Mr Romney and contradict a widespread
perception among political pundits of both stripes that the former
Massachusetts governor had been gaining ground on Mr Obama.
The
Quinnipiac results showed Mr Obama leading by a comfortable nine points
in Ohio – the state seen by many analysts as the key barometer of the
2012 campaign – by six points in Pennsylvania and a marginal four points
in Florida.
Analysis of the NBC/WSJ
data showed that Mr Obama is, for now, managing to retain the coalition
of black, female and young voters who propelled him to a landslide
victory in 2008. Mr Romney leads among the Tea Party movement and white
males.
Nationally Mr Obama is still only narrowly ahead of Mr Romney, with a 2.6 per cent lead in RealClearPolitics aggregate of polls.
However taking into account the importance of the
swing states Mr Obama would currently safely hold 268 electoral college
votes – just two short of 270 votes needed to win the White House,
according to the poll-tracking service Polltracker.com. Mr Romney has
just 219 safe votes, needing to win a far greater proportion of the
'toss up' states.
Mr Obama's strong showing among was attributed to his headline-grabbing promise to give a partial amnesty to the children of illegal immigrants and a television advertising blitz focusing on Mr Romney's record as the head of Bain Capital, the venture capital firm.
Despite reservations among some democrats that Mr Obama risked being labeled "anti-business" in hard economic times, the campaign has kept up a withering assault on Mr Romney's time at Bain, accusing him of out-sourcing jobs and depicting him as a heartless elitist.
In the latest advert in a $10m (GBP6.4m) TV campaign in Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia the Obama-supporting group Priorities USA Action accused Bain of closing the office supplies firm AMPAD even as Bain executives pocketed $100m in profits.
An employee, Mike Earnest, recalled being asked to build a 30ft stage at the company's factory in Indiana from which, days later, Bain executives then announced he and his colleagues had lost their jobs. "It was like building my own coffin," he says.
The Romney campaign, which has tried to focus the election debate on the faltering economic recovery, has defended their candidate as a net creator of jobs during his time at Bain, without ever replying to specific accusations.
Mr Romney has faced calls from within his own party to run a more aggressive campaign, articulating more clearly how his small government, low tax vision for American would contrast Mr Obama's mantra of higher taxes on millionaires and a 'fair shake' for the middle classes.
Pollsters found that at this early stage in the campaign Mr Romney had still to make an impression with the voters, with only 20 per cent knowing "a lot" about him, compared with 43 per cent for Mr Obama.
"He's a known name but an unknown person," said Peter D. Hart, a democratic pollster who conducted the NBC/WSJ telephone survey of 1,000 adults, "They just haven't related to him."
The polls come during a hiatus in the campaign with both candidates focusing most of their energies on fundraising, with Mr Obama claiming this week in an email to supporters that he could be "first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign".
However Republicans dismissed the claims as a disingenuous attempt to rally his supporters, pointing out that Mr Obama has more than $100m of cash-in-hand and has been out-spending Mr Romney on TV adverts this past month by a factor of 10 to one.
Mr Obama's strong showing among was attributed to his headline-grabbing promise to give a partial amnesty to the children of illegal immigrants and a television advertising blitz focusing on Mr Romney's record as the head of Bain Capital, the venture capital firm.
Despite reservations among some democrats that Mr Obama risked being labeled "anti-business" in hard economic times, the campaign has kept up a withering assault on Mr Romney's time at Bain, accusing him of out-sourcing jobs and depicting him as a heartless elitist.
In the latest advert in a $10m (GBP6.4m) TV campaign in Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia the Obama-supporting group Priorities USA Action accused Bain of closing the office supplies firm AMPAD even as Bain executives pocketed $100m in profits.
An employee, Mike Earnest, recalled being asked to build a 30ft stage at the company's factory in Indiana from which, days later, Bain executives then announced he and his colleagues had lost their jobs. "It was like building my own coffin," he says.
The Romney campaign, which has tried to focus the election debate on the faltering economic recovery, has defended their candidate as a net creator of jobs during his time at Bain, without ever replying to specific accusations.
Mr Romney has faced calls from within his own party to run a more aggressive campaign, articulating more clearly how his small government, low tax vision for American would contrast Mr Obama's mantra of higher taxes on millionaires and a 'fair shake' for the middle classes.
Pollsters found that at this early stage in the campaign Mr Romney had still to make an impression with the voters, with only 20 per cent knowing "a lot" about him, compared with 43 per cent for Mr Obama.
"He's a known name but an unknown person," said Peter D. Hart, a democratic pollster who conducted the NBC/WSJ telephone survey of 1,000 adults, "They just haven't related to him."
The polls come during a hiatus in the campaign with both candidates focusing most of their energies on fundraising, with Mr Obama claiming this week in an email to supporters that he could be "first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign".
However Republicans dismissed the claims as a disingenuous attempt to rally his supporters, pointing out that Mr Obama has more than $100m of cash-in-hand and has been out-spending Mr Romney on TV adverts this past month by a factor of 10 to one.
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