Obama Surges Ahead In Polls, Cash

President Barack Obama has surged ahead in national and swing state polls after the Democratic convention and is raising more cash than Mitt Romney for the first time in four months. The Romney campaign reaction yesterday was to blame the liberal media, dismiss Obama’s poll bounce as a post-convention ‘sugar high’ and seek to reassure Republicans with a message of ‘Don’t Panic!’

In August, Obama and the Democratic Party raised more than $114 million - $3 million more than Romney and the Republican party - the first time he has been ahead in the money race since Romney secured the Republican Party’s nomination in April.

With less than two months to go to election day, Obama has opened up a small but significant gap in national polls. In daily tracking polls released yesterday, Gallup and Rasmussen gave the President a five-point lead over Romney.

More ominously for Romney, polls in the battleground states where the election will be decided consistently show him at a disadvantage.

A new Public Policy Polling survey taken after both parties’ conventions found Obama leading Romney by 50 to 45 per cent in in Ohio while the two nominees were tied in Florida and Virginia – both states which the Romney campaign had hoped to have firmly in its camp by now.

Of the eight battleground states, the RealClearPolitics average shows Obama leading in seven, with Romney only ahead in North Carolina, which Obama won by just a few thousand votes in 2008 and was always considered an unlikely ‘hold’ for him this time around.

In an attempt to push back on a growing conventional wisdom that Obama is very strongly placed to secure victory in November, Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, wrote in a memo about the state of the race: ‘Don’t get too worked up about the latest polling.

“While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly. The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama Presidency, and Mitt Romney will win this race,” he wrote.

Romney advisers also point out that in 1980, Ronald Reagan, who went on to win  44 out of 50 states against President Jimmy Carter, also trailed by five percentage points. That lead grew to almost 10 per cent later in the autumn before Reagan eventually romped home.

In an interview with National Review, a senior Romney adviser said that the media was in league with the Obama campaign to highlight bad news for Romney because the press had a vested interest in the President being re-elected.

“Sometimes I think there’s a conscious effort between the media and Chicago to get Republicans depressed,’ the adviser said.

“And I hope our friends realize that all these media analysts out there are Democrats who want us to lose. And the more Washington DC controls our economy, the more important inside-the-beltway publications are and the more money they make.”