9/19 Top Political Headlines

* WGOG’s first weekly electoral college projection map is out based on the latest state-by-state poll numbers.  As things stand today, President Obama can lay claim to 241 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.  Mitt Romney tallies 181, with 116 votes still up for grabs in Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada.  Under this scenario, Romney would have to win the state of Florida in order to reach 270.  View the map here.

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* A brand-new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds President Obama leading Mitt Romney 50%-45% among likely voters and his approval rating sitting right at 50% among registered voters (the first time he’s reached that point since March).

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*Mitt Romney continued to stand Tuesday behind his suggestion that he would have a tough time winning over those who pay no income taxes, pivoting in an afternoon interview to accusing President Obama of supporting redistribution of wealth, reports NBC News.  Romney said he was simply offering an assessment of how Obama was likely to receive almost half the vote when he spoke at a fundraiser in May, which was surreptitiously recorded and made public on Monday.

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* Democrats running for the House and Senate are pouncing on Romney’s remarks that nearly half of all Americans think they are “victims” entitled to government helf and the he doesn’t worry about “those people.”  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi appeared on NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday.  She said statements Romney makes in the video are not, in her view, comparable to statements made by President Obama four years ago about some Americans clinging to “guns and religion.”

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* A good read is coming to bookstores next week.  Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor are the authors of The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama.