Griper Blade: Bain Attacks Erode Mitt's Favorables

Yesterday, I touched briefly on two contradictory polls on the issue of Team Obama's Bain attacks and whether they were hurting Mitt Romney. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that "By more than 2-1, 63%-29%, those surveyed say Romney's background in business, including his tenure at the private equity firm Bain Capital, would cause him to make good decisions, not bad ones, in dealing with the nation's economic problems over the next four years." So, despite the Obama attacks on his Bain record, Gallup found most thought Romney's Bain years were a positive.

But a Reuters/Ipsos poll released the very next day found that over a third of respondents said "that what they had heard about Romney's taxes and his time at Bain Capital private equity firm had given them a less favorable impression of the Republican candidate."

My take on all of this was that it was Reuters' finding that was probably truest, since Team Obama wasn't changing their strategy. Based on their behavior, I deduced that their own tracking was showing it working. And today Greg Sargent points to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll [pdf] that suggests the same thing. It finds that Obama leads Romney 49%-43%, that Romney's favorables are underwater at 35% favorable to 40% unfavorable, that 52% say they don’t identify with Romney’s "background and set of values," and "43 percent say they’ve seen, heard, or read something in the past few weeks that gives them a more negative impression of Romney."...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]