Obama, Romney surrogates insist their guy will win. Both can't be right.
On this last Sunday before 2012’s contentious presidential election, campaign surrogates had their game faces on, bluffing and butting heads rhetorically about what Election Day portends.
President Obama and former President Bill Clinton appear onstage after Mr. Obama addressed the crowd at a campaign event at State Capitol Square in Concord, N.H., Sunday.
Larry Downing/REUTERS
Except for religious broadcasting on some obscure cable channels, Sunday morning pre-football TV is all about the nation’s other contact sport: politics.
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On this last Sunday before 2012’s contentious presidential election, Republican and Democrat campaign surrogates had their game faces on, bluffing and butting heads rhetorically about what Election Day portends.
"I'm very confident that, two days out from Election Day, the president's going to be re-elected on Tuesday night," David Plouffe, a White House adviser who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, said on NBC’s "Meet the Press."
Over on “Fox News Sunday,” Rich Beeson, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, was confidently predicting that his man would win 300 electoral votes – far more than the 270 necessary to take the White House.
"It's going to be a big win for Governor Romney," Mr. Beeson declared.
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Also on Fox News, Obama senior adviser David Axelrod dismissed GOP claims to have made Pennsylvania competitive.
"They understand that they're in deep trouble," Mr. Axelrod said. "They understand that the traditional, or the battleground, states that we've been focusing are not working out for them. Now they're looking for somewhere, desperately looking for somewhere."
In the all-important battleground state of Ohio, the Real Clear Politics polling average shows Mr. Obama ahead by nearly three percentage points.
But US Sen. Rob Portman (R) of Ohio, a prominent Romney campaign surrogate, told CNN’s Candy Crowley he’s confident that the GOP candidate has a good chance of taking the state.
"All the polls are going in the right direction, so I'm very happy about the polling," he said. "I feel very good about Ohio.” Still, he acknowledged, he “wouldn’t want to risk” trying to win without Ohio – something no Republican presidential candidate has ever done.














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