Free Republic

On paper, Republicans Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Rob Portman of Ohio should be losing in the polls in their U.S. Senate re-election races. Both men have been hammered for a month over whether they will support their party's presumptive nominee, their opposition to voting on President Obama's Supreme Court nominee and their refusal to enact new gun legislation after the massacre in Orlando. Yet both are defying conventional political wisdom. Toomey increased his lead over Democrat Katie McGinty by 8 percentage points in the latest Quinnipiac survey. Portman's numbers improved by 9 points, placing him in a tie with...

Mitt Romney has a path to 270 electoral votes, but no room for error, according to Suffolk University’s analysis of bellwether areas in the key swing states of Ohio and New Hampshire. Romney held leads in Lake County, Ohio and in the towns of Epping and Milford, New Hampshire. The states of Ohio and New Hampshire are key to Romney’s path to victory, and a must hold for President Barack Obama to stave him off. A bellwether is an area of a state that closely mirrors a statewide electoral outcome using similar election types from previous elections and other data....

McCain Outperforming Bush in Ohio Bellwethers? I continue to hear from my source on the ground in Ohio, who is seeing results for McCain that are surprisingly good. He puts it, "in a key bellweather section of Ohio, McCain continues to show internals that are exceeding the national pollsters’ results. This portends a potentially larger McCain victory in Ohio than Bush had in 2004.” As for those national pollsters, note that Fox News/Rasmussen puts McCain up 2, NBC/Mason-Dixon puts McCain up 1 and Rasmussen had it a tie last week. My guy on the ground thinks this might mean that...