Just a day before Election Day, President Obama is leading Mitt Romney by five points in the ever-important state of Iowa, according to a new Des Moines Register poll.
The president stands at 47 percent with Romney at 42 %. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
This is a number that is causing the Romney campaign to despair, Joe Scarborough said this morning.
“Of all the polls that are out, this is the only poll where Romney people have shown despair,” he said on Morning Joe Monday. “When that poll came out, they hung their heads. They don’t believe a lot of the Ohio polls, [but] this one really surprised them this weekend. They really believed they were going to win Iowa. I don’t know if they believe that.”
The president and Romney are both making final pushes in the state and hoping to pick up the state’s six electoral votes. Worth noting in the poll is 42 percent of the state’s likely voters have already gone to the polls.
The Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez reports on a Sunday campaign stop Romney made in the state: a speech at Des Moines’ Hy-Vee Hall. “Talk is cheap, but a record is real and it’s earned with real effort,’ Romney told a boisterous crowd of 4,000 supporters…reprising his stump-speech appeal for them to reach out to friends and neighbors who may still be undecided. ‘You can’t measure change in speeches. You measure change in achievements.’” There were encouraging signs for Romney ahead of his arrival in the state. Last week, the Des Moines Register, which backed then-Sen. Obama in 2008, endorsed Romney, arguing that voters should give him “a chance to correct the nation’s fiscal course and to implode the partisan gridlock that has shackled Washington and the rest of America — with the understanding that he would face the same assessment in four years if he does not succeed.” CBS News’ Jan Crawford notes the Register’s endorsement of Romney is the first time in 40 years the paper has backed a GOP presidential candidate. Crawford also continues on Iowa’s importance for Romney: “Romney needs Iowa because it would lessen the pressure on him to win Ohio, which has remained tough for him to crack. That’s largely because he was targeted throughout the summer with negative ads skewering him as a rich and heartless corporate raider–and one who would turn his back on the auto industry, to boot.”
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