'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Mitt Romney's presidential campaign paid millions of dollars to companies led by top advisers and, by many measures, the campaign got less to show for it than in-house staffers performing a labor of love for President Obama's campaign, expenditure records show.
President Barack Obama heads toward Election Day with an apparent lead over Republican Mitt Romney among early voters in key states that could decide the election.
The presidential candidates are as closely matched in cash as they are in the polls, new disclosures show, adding pressure for both candidates to raise money at a breakneck speed even as their attention is most needed to court voters in swing states.
Top officials at the Republican National Committee and the Mitt Romney presidential campaign on Tuesday touted the GOP's surpassing 4 million voter contacts in Virginia, which includes seven times the number of phone calls and 11 times as many as door knocks at this point in 2008.
Mitt Romney's campaign is working hard to chip away at President Obama's advantage among early voters, and there are signs the effort is paying off in North Carolina and Florida, two states the Republican nominee can ill afford to lose.
Third-party candidates Gary Johnson and Virgil Goode are blips in the presidential race. Yet in a tight race between Democratic President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney that likely will be won or lost at the margins, even blips can be a big deal.
With a little more than five weeks to Election Day, President Obama is within reach of the 270 electoral votes needed to win a second term. Republican Mitt Romney's path to victory is narrowing.
Mitt Romney is set to clinch the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday night with a win in the Texas primary, a triumph of endurance for a candidate who came up short four years ago and watched this year as voters flirted for months with a carousel of GOP rivals.
The costly Republican primary has been draining Mitt Romney's wallet and giving President Obama time to build an expansive campaign architecture with offices in 45 states and hundreds of employees. The bad news for Obama is he's had to start paying for all this now.
Though he has called himself the true conservative in the Republican presidential field, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania continued to benefit from crossover Democrats in Super Tuesday's primaries, while front-runner Mitt Romney easily won the vote among actual Republicans, according to a Washington Times analysis.
Resurgent Rick Santorum said his sweep of three GOP contests earned his shoestring campaign $250,000 overnight, cash he needs to take his upstart bid for the Republican presidential nomination to Mitt Romney's turf.
Newt Gingrich is surging in the presidential polls, but his campaign organization has not caught up — making it possible he'll miss Wednesday's deadline to file enough signatures to even appear on Ohio's primary ballot.
"They are underperforming what their 2008 numbers were and we are overperforming where we were in 2008," said Rich Beeson, Romney's political director. "We feel very good heading into the Tuesday election."
He said the western part of the state is more conservative, and he said Mr. Romney can be more competitive in the vote-rich Philadelphia suburbs in a way no Republican has been since 1988.
