The U.S. election (of course) was all over the papers. It is interesting to see the papers’ different perspectives: the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on the right; the New York Times (NYT) on the left; and the British Financial Times (FT) relatively nonpartisan, but still a financial paper with all that implies. The FT linked a “Romney regroups” picture on the front page to “Romney tries to sooth donors” (p. 5), which states that Romney is trailing in nearly all of the swing states and is limiting public events in order to spend more time fund-raising.
The NYT story seems to confirm some of the FT’s key points, with “Romney Campaign Cautious with Ad Budget, Even in Key States” (p. A13). The article says that the campaign has been at a significant advertising disadvantage in key states due to limited financial resources, and that the imbalance would be even worse were it not for Super PAC spending on his behalf. The limitations are reported to be because much of what Romney has raised is earmarked for other uses, not as campaign funds. In fact, the article reports, the Obama campaign is actually raising more in usable campaign funds.
Even the WSJ seems to confirm at least some of the FT story, with “Romney Plans New Focus on Swing States” (p. A4); the subheading is that fund-raising work had limited his time in those critical states. The WSJ article pretty much runs through the points from the FT and from much of the NYT article, highlighting the plan to run more ads, but it also says he will spend less time with donors and more time on the campaign trail. The WSJ article also notes that Romney is trailing Obama in polls in Virginia and Ohio and is looking for an alternate Electoral College route to victory.
Overall, the signs are pretty bad for Republicans. The FT even has a story on page 5, “Democrats start to close gap on Republicans in race for Senate”—the title is pretty self-explanatory.
As they say, however, a week is a long time in politics and there are several of them until the election. The news media thrives on drama, so perhaps we can expect the inevitable Romney resurgence next week. I will be watching.