Against backdrop of Harvard power outage, Obama and Romney power players discuss lessons of 2012 campaign - Yahoo! News: Only once did Obama hold a larger advantage. That was during the mid-September period when a bounce from the successful Democratic convention and the unearthing of the inflammatory Romney “47 percent” video expanded Obama’s swing state lead to 6 points. As Simas explained, the major shift was among Republican-leaning independents and white males moving from the Romney camp to undecided. After Obama’s poor performance in the first debate, those voters came back to Romney.
Obama adviser Axelrod was withering in his disdain for media’s obsession with largely meaningless national polling trends. At one point Axelrod snapped, “Everything becomes a big horse-race story – and you guys don’t even know where the horses are.”