Political odd coupling, and Tuesday's tight race

The National Journal has an interesting look at U.S. senators, using an assessment of how far apart some states' senators are in ideology and Senate votes on issues. The state with the most divided senators on issues is Iowa, whose "odd couple" of Democrat Tom Harkin and Republican Chuck Grassley have a differential rating of 64.8, according to the Journal's scoring. North Carolina's two senators weren't far behind. Coming in third, Democrat Kay Hagan and Republican Richard Burr had a differential rating of 59.7. Squeezed in between are Wisconsin's Herb Kohl, a Democrat, and Republican Ron Johnson.

Interestingly, fourth on the list is Ohio, a key state in tomorrow's Super Tuesday primary voting. The differential rating between Ohio's two senators, Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican Rob Portman is 55.7. Front-running Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are looking to Ohio to boost their campaign hopes this week. But polls are still see-sawing between the two. The most recent released earlier today, the Suffolk University poll, gave the edge to Santorum. Santorum led Romney 37 percent to 33 percent in a poll of likely Ohio voters. Newt Gingrich was third with 16 percent and Ron Paul came in fourth with 8 percent.

Another poll released today showed the slugfest in the GOP contest may be helping President Barack Obama, giving him a boost from a surprising quarter. The new NBC/Wall Street Journal national survey released Monday, showed Obama with a 50 percent to 43 percent advantage over Romney nationally, up from a 47 percent to 44 percent lead in the average of the news organizations' polls during the second half of 2011, just before the voting began in the Republican race. Obama has made his biggest gains among the group that has consistently resisted him the most: white voters without a college education.

In the NBC/WSJ surveys through the second half of 2011, Romney led Obama among those working-class white voters by a commanding 52 percent to 38 percent, according to figures provided by Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the survey with Democrat Peter Hart. But in latest survey, Romney's advantage with those voters had shriveled to just five percentage points-48 percent to 43 percent. By comparison, in 2008 non-college white voters backed John McCain over Obama by a resounding 58 percent to 40 percent; Republicans won even more of them (63 percent) in the 2010 Congressional election.

Rick Santorum's recent diatribe against Obama as a "snob" for touting a more educated populace might not be working. Could be many in the working class have aspirations for more learning too for themselves and their children.

Santorum obviously does for his children. On Monday, he was out speaking to a crowd in Miamisburg, Ohio, bemoaning being outspent by Romney and saying he had to draw down on his own savings and money he's putting aside for his children's college educations.

Say what? “We’re living basically spending down our savings," Santorum said. "Not necessarily the best thing to do when you have three kids entering into college the next couple of years.”

Ahem. Do as I say, not as I do, Rick?

Posted by Fannie Flono
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