Latest polls: CO: Selzer/University of Denver: Obama 47-43%; Romney leads with military voters 66-26%.
Gallup sees a five-point shift for Romney pre- and post-debate.
Ad spending update: We’re now past the $700 million mark with $719 million spent overall. Team Romney’s has outspent Team Obama $392 million to $327 million. This week, $35 million is being spent -- Team Romney’s outpacing Team Obama $19.7 million to $15.5 million. The ads are running in nine states – IA, CO, FL, NC, NH, NV, OH, VA, WI. No Michigan, no Pennsylvania.
“A federal appeals court panel ruled Friday that Ohio counties can keep polls open for in-person early voting the three days before the election, delivering a win to the Obama campaign after months of legal wrangling over the battleground state’s election rules,” the Boston Globe writes.
The AP’s Feller sets the stage for the stretch run: “Rumbling into its final four weeks, the presidential campaign is playing out on both coasts and multiple fronts, with Republican Mitt Romney seeking stature on foreign affairs and President Barack Obama raising political cash by the millions. Negative ads, charges of dishonesty and dwindling time are all setting the tone.”
Fantasyland: A Virginia blogger was unhappy with polling showing Romney losing, so he decided to try and “fix” them. His “instant popularity on the right marked a kind of death knell for the aphorism often attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: ‘Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,’ a claim that has faced an unusual assault this election year,” Ben Smith writes.
More: “More of the 2012 cycle’s descents into fantasyland — the unskewing of polls and BLS paranoia most obvious among them — have featured Republicans than Democrats, prompting some on the left to argue that American conservatives have a particular hostility to reality. And certainly, the conservative movement has long nourished more skepticism of the mainstream media and of some forms of government authority than has the left. But there’s probably a simpler explanation for at least some of this: Mitt Romney has spent most of the year losing, and so the Republicans are the ones feeling compelled to re-imagine the polls.”
And: “This fall’s arguments over basic facts have been the strangest and most interesting features of a generally dull political cycle, and the main consolation may be that if a poor grasp on facts is a growing and disturbing feature of American politics it is not entirely new. Senator Moynihan’s famous quote itself, in fact, appears to have been misattributed to him.”
