NYT/CBS/Quinnipiac poll: Obama up in Wis., Va., close in Colo.
By ALEXANDER BURNS
9/19/12 6:40 AM EDT
The latest round of polling from the New York Times, CBS and Quinnipiac University finds Obama up in two key Midwestern states, along with a tight race in Colorado that's welcome news for Mitt Romney. The headline focuses on Wisconsin, where the survey suggests Romney's initial bounce from choosing Paul Ryan as his VP may have subsided:
[In Wisconsin] President Obama has overtaken Mr. Romney on who would do a better job handling the economy, according to a new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News poll of likely Wisconsin voters. The poll also found that Mr. Obama has a 17-point edge over Mr. Romney when voters are asked if a candidate cares about their needs and problems.The problem for Romney, for a while, has been that Obama has more paths to victory than he does on the electoral map, so the president only needs a handful of states to tip his way in order to win while Romney needs most of the competitive states to tip his way. Having Wisconsin move his way last month wasn't going to be enough for Romney if he could swing Ohio and Virginia, and having Colorado a dead heat now doesn't do much for Romney if Wisconsin is drifting away again.
As the president makes his first campaign visit of the year to Wisconsin on Saturday, the poll found that Mr. Obama was the choice of 51 percent to 45 percent for Mr. Romney among likely voters. The six-point lead, which includes those who said they were leaning in one direction or another, marks a slight shift in Mr. Obama’s direction since Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin joined the Republican ticket last month. …
The latest collection of surveys also included Colorado, where Mr. Romney is running nearly even with Mr. Obama, and Virginia, where Mr. Obama has a narrow advantage of four percentage points, both of which are inside the survey’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for each candidate.
* The headline of this post has been corrected. A previous headline mistakenly listed Ohio as a state included in the poll.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-...html?hp=r12_b7