Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Schadenfreude

Do it yourself poll graphing at Huffington Post's pollster.com, this one set to sensitive and without Rasmussen. Just for fun.

EJ Dionne:

When even Scott Walker and Paul Ryan kind-of, sort-of side with labor against management, who knows what else is possible? Maybe they'll endorse tax increases and say nice things about teachers unions.

Gail Collins and David Brooks:

Gail Collins: David, you've been very forthright in your criticism of the Romney campaign, and I cannot possibly pretend I haven't been enjoying it. Is it disconcerting to be getting all those mash notes from liberals?

David Brooks: Yes. I certainly don't mind the nice notes from the thoughtful liberals, but when the hyper-partisan ones start in with the love, that gets a little creepy.

Gail: I think it's only fair to give you a rest. Today let's talk about entitlements so you can reclaim your conservative mojo.

Greg Sargent:

A lot of the commentary about the national and state polls that are shifting away from Mitt Romney focuses on his various missteps ' the response to the Embassy attacks, the freeloading 47 percent remarks ' as major causes of his political travails. And those are probably important.

But those don't explain why Obama's approval numbers, and his numbers on the economy in particular, seem to be visibly improving. Which suggests another possible explanation for all the movement: There may be stuff happening in the economy that hasn't registered in the national jobs numbers political reporters and commentators focus relentlessly upon, but could easily be driving voter sentiment.

Polls getting so bad for Mitt Romney this morning I saw a guy scraping a Romney bumper sticker off his car. It was Paul Ryan. #GOP2012
' @chrisrockoz via web [parody site]

NBC News:

New U.S. single-family home sales eased in August but held near two-year highs and prices vaulted to their highest level in more than five years, adding to signs of a broadening housing market recovery.

CBS:

On the heels of several new polls showing President Obama opening up big leads over Mitt Romney in key battleground states, some Republicans are accusing pollsters of a Democratic bias -- and suggesting that the recent poll numbers don't tell the real story.

National Journal:

The Romney campaign is questioning several swing-state polls out today that show President Obama is firmly ahead of his GOP challenger, saying the method used 'does not make sense.'

Three new polls from CBS News/New York Times/Quinnipiac University show Obama up 9 percent in Florida, 10 percent in Ohio and 12 percent in Pennsylvania.

Republicans recently have complained that Democrats are being over-sampled in polls, skewing the results. Pollsters have argued that the results reflect slight changes in public sentiment, and that adjusting their polls to match arbitrary party-identification targets would be unscientific.

Also in his NBC intv, Romney calls it a "tied race," citing Rasmussen and Gallup polls. Gallup daily tracking today was Obama 50, Romney 44.
' @mpoindc via Seesmic twhirl
Nate Cohn:

One common complaint in the current conservative fusillade is that many 2012 polls  are using the '2008 turnout model.' Karl Rove, for instance, alleges that the pollsters are weighting their surveys to reflect the partisan and racial composition of the 2008 electorate'when Democrats outnumbered their Republican counterparts by 7 points on election day. Conservative critics think the GOP's enthusiasm to oust President Obama means that differential will be a lot smaller this year. That might be valid, but the implication that polls are rigged to reflect the 2008 electorate is outright misleading: most of this year's polls don't use 'the 2008 turnout model.'

In fact, the '2008 turnout model' critique is so far off base that responding to it simply entails explaining how polls work.

Josh Marshall:

You can read into the totality of the last 18 months and the poll numbers that have tracked them that the general public had real doubts about Mitt Romney, what his priorities were, what he really believed and so forth. These of course were counter-balanced by deep discontent with the state of the economy. Against this kindling of doubt, Democrats painted a picture of Romney as an out-of-touch centi-millionaire, who played every rigged angle of the current system and had some mix of contempt and indifference for the lives of ordinary working and middle class families. Then those 47% comments came along and it turned out that cartoon caricature Mitt Romney was actually real Mitt Romney.

I suspect that's when he definitively lost the race.

Among deserved plaudits for Bill Clinton's big speech at the DNC, where's the acknowledgment that Romney's 47% comment is no ordinary gaffe?
' @DemFromCT via web
Ian Reifowitz:

In his remarks at the United Nations on Tuesday, President Obama made two crucial and interrelated points about core principles that define our country and our role in the world. As many have discussed, he offered a ringing defense of the principle of free speech, but that's not all he did. Obama also defined an American Mission, arguing that our country can and must provide a model of how to accommodate diversity in a society unified around democratic principles of freedom and liberty.

AP-GfK:

It still divides us, but most Americans think President Barack Obama's health care law is here to stay.
More than 7 in 10 say the law will fully go into effect with some changes, ranging from minor to major alterations, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.

Gail Collins:

In my next life, I want to be an undecided voter in Ohio.

Honest to gosh, can you imagine the love? If the Ohio Undecided Voter had a Twitter account, it would have 10 million followers. Each campaign would have an entire operation dedicated to watching it. People in China and Bulgaria who wanted to understand what's going on in this election would just check in with #IhavenoideainSteubenville.

The American Conservative:

If Romney does go down to defeat, it won't be his fault entirely. Obama will have once again beaten George W. Bush. Romney's biggest campaign mishap may not have been any of the famous gaffes, but rather his failure to distance himself from Bush.