The New Republic

After Romney gained about 3 points over the weekend, Obama made gains in today’s Rasmussen and Gallup approval tracking polls, suggesting that Romney’s bounce had peaked and was beginning to fade. At least until Pew interrupted. READ MORE >>

With post-debate polls showing Romney making gains nationally, the race appears tight enough to again merit consideration of the Electoral College. So what states are most important to watch after the debates? While Florida, Virginia, and Colorado could all prove decisive, the pre-debate polls suggested that Romney's biggest problems were Iowa, Nevada, and Ohio. Consider an average of post-DNC polls in the battleground states: READ MORE >>

This election, we’ve heard a lot about divisions that define America. First it was the 99 percent and the 1 percent. Then it was the moochers and the makers. Politicians, of course, love to claim that we are more than the sum of our differences, but the dividers actually have a point. In all kinds of real and practical ways, the United States today is not one nation, but two. We’ve come to think of “blue” and “red” states as political and cultural categories. The rift, though, goes much deeper than partisan differences of opinion. The borders of the United States contain two different forms of government, based on two different visions of the social contract. In blue America, state government costs more—and it spends more to ensure that everybody can pay for basic necessities such as food, housing, and health care. It invests more heavily in the long-term welfare of its population, with better-funded public schools, subsidized day care, and support for people with disabilities. In some cases, in fact, state lawmakers have decided that the social contract provided by the federal government is not generous enough. It was a blue state that first established universal health insurance and, today, it is a handful of blue states that offer paid family and medical leave.In the red states, government is cheaper, which means the people who live there pay lower taxes. But they also get a lot less in return. The unemployment checks run out more quickly and the schools generally aren’t as good. Assistance with health care, child care, and housing is skimpier, if it exists at all. The result of this divergence is that one half of the country looks more and more like Scandinavia, while the other increasingly resembles a social Darwinist’s paradise.Americans have been arguing over which system is morally and economically superior since the beginning of the republic. But every now and then, the worldviews have clashed and forced a reckoning. The 2012 election is one of those moments.One of the campaign’s most contentious issues is the Affordable Care Act (ACA)—the legislation that finally mended a gaping hole in the American safety net. Yet already this year, more than a dozen Republican governors have called upon their states to reject or resist the ACA. If they get their way, Americans living in states that implement the ACA will effectively have a right to health insurance. Americans living in the anti-ACA states would not. Now, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are vowing not only to repeal the ACA altogether, but to turn vast swaths of public policy—including Medicaid, food stamps, and housing—over to the states.This promise gets little attention, but it is one of the most radical parts of their agenda. It would entail a massive transfer of authority away from Washington, arguably unprecedented in U.S. history, in which states would get a lot less federal money for welfare programs and a lot more power over how big those programs should be. The blue states might scrape up the money to replace existing federal funds on their own. Red states would almost surely seize the opportunity to pare back the already meager assistance they provide. Tens of millions of Americans would likely lose health insurance. Millions more would likely lose access to food stamps, the program that has become the primary safety net during the Great Recession.Romney and Ryan like to say that giving states more autonomy would encourage innovative and efficient solutions to social problems. But what their agenda would really do is undermine modern standards of economic security, creating among the red states a region in which government doesn’t even try to guarantee that everybody can pay for basic necessities of life. It would do nothing less than change the postwar definition of what it means to be an American. READ MORE >>

Tarzan of the ApesBy Edgar Rice Burroughs (Library of America, 432 pp., $20) READ MORE >>

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Without CBS/NYT/Quinnipiac, today was all but assured to be a better polling day for Romney. That said, the polls still suggest that Obama leads nationally, as well as in states worth 348 electoral votes. READ MORE >>

Over the summer, polls showed Obama with a broad but narrow lead across the battleground states, roughly commensurate with his advantage nationally. Romney looked slightly weak in Ohio, but he only trailed by two or three points in public surveys—hardly an insurmountable margin. And Romney’s Ohio problem was somewhat mitigated by the selection of Paul Ryan, which appeared to vault Wisconsin into the toss-up column and create a somewhat credible path to victory without the Buckeye State. READ MORE >>

With Romney trailing by a clear margin, a frontal assault on the accuracy of polling has begun. Some of the skepticism is understandable, but other elements are brazenly self-serving. I'll be assessing the critiques of the polls over the next few days, but any debate about the accuracy of the polls must start by remembering a central point: The polls are usually pretty good. READ MORE >>

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Last Monday, I wrote that “If Obama’s four point lead persists through the week, Obama should be considered a very strong favorite for reelection.” The last week has come and gone, and Obama retains a four-point advantage nationally. This argument will be elaborated on over the course of this week, but the bottom line is that Obama’s a heavy favorite for reelection. READ MORE >>