In many areas, things are looking up even though unemployment is high in four swing states. Nevada has the worst unemployment rate. That, and the rates in Florida, Michigan and North Carolina are above the national average.
Chris Cillizza reports that beyond those figures, things are looking up. Most agree that Obama's reelection will be determined by employment numbers and, if you get into the state-by-state numbers, things are looking pretty good.
There’s little doubt that the 2012 election is shaping up as a referendum on Obama’s handling of the economy. And while the macro numbers on the economy aren’t great for the president’s political prospects, the micro numbers are significantly better.
Given that a presidential election is less a single national contest than a series of state-by-state battles, the unemployment numbers should give the White House a glimmer of political optimism on the economy. ...WaPo
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A few pages away in the Washington Post, EJ Dionne points to the largely successful on the part of Republican-governed states to limit the vote.
... The laws in question include requiring voter identification cards at the polls, limiting the time of early voting, ending same-day registration and making it difficult for groups to register new voters.
Sometimes the partisan motivation is so clear that if Stephen Colbert reported on what’s transpiring, his audience would assume he was making it up. In Texas, for example, the law allows concealed handgun licenses as identification but not student IDs. And guess what? Nationwide exit polls show that John McCain carried households in which someone owned a gun by 25 percentage points but lost voters in households without a gun by 32 points.
Besides Texas, states that enacted voter ID laws this year include Kansas, Wisconsin, South Carolina and Tennessee. Indiana and Georgia already had such requirements. The Maine Legislature voted to end same-day voter registration. Florida seems determined to go back to the chaos of the 2000 election. It shortened the early voting period, effectively ended the ability of registered voters to correct their address at the polls and imposed onerous restrictions on organized voter-registration drives. ...
