Townhall Debate Thread Oct 16.

[KevinNYC]

Looking at the sites that do polling averages

The HuffPost Pollster tracking model currently gives Obama a very slight advantage in the national popular vote, less than 1 percentage point as of this writing.

TPM's Polltracker has Obama up just .3 and projects 244 electoral votes, meaning more states have moved into the tossup category.

Real Clear Politics has Romney +0.1

538 says [QUOTE]National polls showed a modestly favorable trend for President Obama, allowing him to gain slightly in our forecast. (Mr. Obama

[longhornfan1234]

Romney is going to belittle Obama tonight.

[niko]

Looking at the sites that do polling averages



TPM's Polltracker has Obama up just .3 and projects 244 electoral votes, meaning more states have moved into the tossup category.

Real Clear Politics has Romney +0.1

538 says


So we basically have another election that is going to depend on turnout. The Democrats tend to have less likely voters than the Republicans do.

Yeah but within 5% is a "toss up" Like Pennsylvania has moved from leaning to toss up. It's no closer to Romney than it was before. I don't see much difference honestly. Maybe we moved from no chance to slightly better chance but this thought that the election is very close i think its misleading.

[TheMan]

Romney is going to belittle Obama tonight.

If that happens, then Obama deserves to lose but I don't that happening. Obama set the bar so low with his last debate that any signs of life from him this time will be seen as a "win".

I agree with the poster above, Romney went from no shot to now having a chance, O needs to put Romney in his pocket tonight

[UConnCeltics]

I think Obama is going to "win" this debate but I wouldn't be surprised at all if Romney improved his position after this. Romney is very good at telling people what they want to hear, and this is a good format for that. As an independent voter, I'll be paying attention tonight.

[rufuspaul]

This style of debate clearly favors Obama. Romney will be fortunate just to make it through gaffe-free. If he can do that and not give the dems any sound bites to use against him then he can re-group and attack during the final debate. The president on the other hand simply has to look halfway credible and compassionate towards the audience.

I'd be very surprised if Romney gets any boost from this one.

[ImmortalD24]

[daily]

This style of debate clearly favors Obama. Romney will be fortunate just to make it through gaffe-free. If he can do that and not give the dems any sound bites to use against him then he can re-group and attack during the final debate. The president on the other hand simply has to look halfway credible and compassionate towards the audience.

I'd be very surprised if Romney gets any boost from this one.

A debate expert actually said the reverse last night on CNN. He was saying the town hall format will be hard for Obama to make up for his last outing because the format is very forgiving to gaffs and errors.

[Patrick Chewing]

This style of debate clearly favors Obama. Romney will be fortunate just to make it through gaffe-free. If he can do that and not give the dems any sound bites to use against him then he can re-group and attack during the final debate. The president on the other hand simply has to look halfway credible and compassionate towards the audience.

I'd be very surprised if Romney gets any boost from this one.

Ummm that's what people said before the first debate

[SpecialQue]

Obama will stutter, mumble, and have some good moments. Romney will be calmer than last time. The night will end with pundits declaring the debate a "draw" and the polls will remain as they are, with neither getting a bump.

[KevinNYC]

This style of debate clearly favors Obama. Romney will be fortunate just to make it through gaffe-free. If he can do that and not give the dems any sound bites to use against him then he can re-group and attack during the final debate. The president on the other hand simply has to look halfway credible and compassionate towards the audience.

I'd be very surprised if Romney gets any boost from this one.

I think this favors Obama as well.

It also covers foreign policy which I think Romney has just been incoherent on. Romney wants to keep the Pentagon's budget at 4 % of GDP (how do you balance the budget if we do that) and he doesn't say why we need to especially given how much the budget has gone up in recent years. Romney wants to build more battleships. Expect him to say tonight that the Navy is as small as it was around WWI.
It's a ridiculous comparison, given how deadly and versatile a modern warship is.

Expect him to hammer away at Benghazi. Darrell Issa just held hearings on Benghazi last week (even though his committee is not the House Intelligence committee and doesn't have their level of security clearances*.) When I first heard the reports, it seem like they had some damning info about security. Except when I read about it, the security requests were about Tripoli, not Benghazi. Tripoli is 13 hours away from Benghazi and also this attack was so large it's still not clear that even if they had all the forces in Tripoli onsite in Behghazi, the attack could have been stopped.

There then is Romney's ideas on Iran and Syria which seems to me to be more of the neocon thinking that got us into Iraq, that regime change is easy and we control the fate of those countries. He just attacked Obama for not speaking about the Green Revolution when protesters took the streets advocating for democracy in 2009. This is just a ludicrously stupid idea, the quickest way to de-legitimize the democracy movement in Iran is to tie it to the United States. This is especially true since we had just invaded Iran's neighbor and bungled it. He's also acting like Obama has done nothing to Iran, when we've been waging covert war with them for a while, including a cyberwar that has destroyed some of their centrifuge cascades and our economic sanctions have devalued their currency and it has Iranians questioning their leadership.

A host of US and European sanctions targeting Iran's oil exports and its banking system over its disputed nuclear program have put a chokehold on the economy. The value of the national currency, the rial, plummeted 40 percent in early October, and inflation stands officially at nearly 24 percent. Experts say the real figure could be double that or more......

More and more, lawmakers and ordinary Iranians blame the high inflation and unemployment as much on the government's mishandling of the oil revenue windfall of recent years as on sanctions.....

Some 102 parliamentarians have signed a letter demanding a chance to question President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his economic policies,

*In fact during the hearing, the GOP started objected wildly to a photo a witness wanted to use, saying it was classified. It was from Google Maps. This pretty much alerted anyone who wanted to know that the photo contained a location used by the CIA.

[rufuspaul]

I still think the townhall meeting style favors Obama. I remember the Bush-Clinton one where Bush came across as a rich elitist with nothing in common with the little people and Bill came across as a fellow neighbor who feels your pain.

[senelcoolidge]

Obama might try to be more like Biden which would actually hurt him. Biden was embarrassing. I could see Obama try to be more aggressive. He will be more in his element since this is a supposed town hall meeting set up. Why are all of the moderators liberals? Why not have independent or libertarian moderators? People are silly that pay attention to appearance...listen to the words.

[Rose]

[Bano114]

The University I go to is literally 5 minutes away from Hofstra. Would have went to a public viewing near by but I have work tonight.