In the battleground states, Obama and Romney are in a hand-to-hand fight in the fog. Obama vs. Romney: 5 hidden factors

The crowning irony of the 2012 campaign is that a deadlocked election fought on the grandest conceptual battlefield — the role of the government in American life — just might turn on the small stuff.

There are still some obvious potential game changers that could shake things up — this week’s hurricane, Friday’s jobless report and a long-anticipated Romney ad blitz — and influence the outcome in unpredictable ways. But in the battleground states, the campaign has taken on the jittery character of a hand-to-hand fight in the fog, with no certain outcome.


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On the surface, the campaign’s big battle plans couldn’t be clearer: Mitt Romney is counting on momentum and a flurry of big money-media buys. Obama is banking on what his campaign touts as the most sophisticated ground operation and voter targeting effort in political history.

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Lurking below the surface is an array of smaller, hidden factors — assets, liabilities, quirks, last-minute surprises — that could break the stalemate. Here are five:

Latino enthusiasm in Colorado

If ever a state exemplified the altered demographic battleground of 2012 — and how Team Obama is making do with less compared to 2008 — it’s here.

Four years ago, Obama won 50 percent of white votes here compared to John McCain’s 48 percent, outpacing Obama’s national performance among that demographic and helping him win the Rocky Mountain State by 9 points.

Obama would happily take a 1-point win this time around. He was doing fairly well with whites until Oct. 3, when his dream of a ’12 repeat romp died at the Denver debate. That Rocky Mountain low propelled Romney into a commanding, growing lead among whites that echoes the nationwide trends.

Democratic pollsters tell POLITICO Obama’s support among whites has nose-dived by 8-to-10 points in a month, fueled by a collapse in his support among white men, especially those under 40. He is doing better with white female voters, but the gender gap has shrunk here as in many other places.

Fortunately for Obama’s team, they have a plan. Since 2008, Hispanic registration — aided by Obama for America organizers who have been working the state’s diverse Latino population — has grown by 20 percent. So has Obama’s share of the Latino vote, if recent polls are to be believed.

Four years ago, Obama bested McCain by a 61-to-38 percent margin among Latinos. This time that margin is more likely to be in the 70-to-30 percent range. That’s commanding, but Latinos only represented 13 percent of the state’s electorate last time. Even if the percentage of support increases — and Obama’s team thinks it will, based on the registration gains — Democrats will have to hustle.

And that will test the campaign’s vaunted ground game to the max. Four out of five Colorado voters will vote early — with the results thus far shading pro-Romney, in part because Hispanics are the group most likely to vote in person on Election Day.

“Obama’s guys are going to have to scrape every vote from Pueblo and Denver,” said a veteran Democratic operative in the state. “He’s got to hold the line, filling in the loss of whites with new Hispanic voters.”

The impact of the Des Moines Register Romney endorsement

Dead-tree newspapers may be declining in influence around the country, but editorial boards still matter — and the Register, which offered a big boost to Obama in ’08, just handed its backing to a Republican for the first time in four decades.

It was a stunning development, and one possibly rooted in Chicago’s mishandling of the board’s request that the contents of the president’s interview with them be made public. Obama’s team finally complied, but only after an editorial writer for the paper politely but firmly made the request in print.

The transcript was revealing, if not revelatory. The president said he expected another stab at the deficit-reduction “Grand Bargain” and would prioritize immigration reform.

A few days later, this: “Voters should give Mitt Romney 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,” the paper concluded.

Howard Fineman of The Huffington Post, a veteran of many a Cedar Rapids caucus winter, might have gone a little overboard when he tweeted, “Des Moines Register endorsement of Mitt first time it’s’ clear O may lose the race.”

But many Democrats felt a cold chill. The polls have been all over the map here, but mostly within the margin of error. Obama’s aides believe the state is leaning slightly — but not decisively — in their direction.

David Yepsen, the face of the paper’s political coverage for decades, said the endorsement could have an impact — but one mitigated by the drama surrounding the decision, and the endorsement’s seeming disconnect with the Register’s historical ideology.

“In a state that could be decided by just a few votes per precinct, any victory for one side or the other is important. This gives Romney a psychological boost and is a downer for Obama’s side,” he told POLITICO.

Still, he added: “This will confound many people — on both the left and the right — because Romney stands for a lot of things the paper has historically opposed.”

Mitt’s pitch to white ethnics in Cuyahoga County

Must-win Ohio is the new Florida. Romney and Obama are scouring the state for every available vote as they gird for an outcome that might come down to a victory margin in the hundreds, not thousands.

In one of the more Florida-ish developments, Romney’s campaign is pushing the Obama-is-bad-for-Israel-line to flip some of the estimated 100,000 to 125,000 Jews clustered in the Cleveland suburbs to jump to the GOP side, largely through the use of surrogates, phone banking and national ads through the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Republican inroads into the Jewish community have been somewhat overstated — conservative Jews like Sheldon Adelson (who has pumped $6.4 million into the RJC) and the pro-Israel AIPAC aren’t representative of the majority of secular U.S. Jews, who are among the most stalwart liberal voters and fundraisers in the Democratic party. Polls show Obama slightly under-performing with the group, down from an estimated 75 percent in 2008 to somewhere in the high 60s this time.

That’s not a huge factor in Ohio, where Jews make up about 2 percent of the vote. But Romney is looking to patch together a win here in the face of a far superior Obama ground organization, which has a substantial lead in early voting estimates.

“We’re not talking big numbers, but we’re looking to erode Obama’s margins,” a Romney strategist said.

Obama’s campaign is concerned enough about the threat to deploy its own big machers — including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who made a shul stop in Akron this weekend.

Another interesting sideshow that could impact the main event: Hungarians — 200,000 of them living in the Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County and the Toledo area. Their voting habits are harder to track than those of Jewish voters, but the Romney campaign is hoping that an unexpected intervention will push thousands more in their direction.

Hungarian-born billionaire Thomas Peterffy has pumped millions into a direct-into-camera ad extolling the virtues of capitalism and the evils of “socialism,” a powerful message for a group that vividly remembers the Soviet crackdown on Hungary’s democratic movement in 1956 — and an unmistakable coded reference to the president.

“America’s wealth comes from the efforts of people striving for success,” says Peterffy, a longtime GOP donor, in the ad airing nationally. “Yes, in socialism the rich will be poorer — but the poor will also be poorer. People will lose interest in really working hard and creating jobs.”

Wisconsin: Obama’s same-day registration bomb

Besides Ohio, no state is being more ferociously contested on the ground than Paul Ryan’s home state, which has been locked in a near-constant partisan war since the election of lightening-rod Gov. Scott Walker in 2010.

Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points in 2008. But he’s clinging to a 2-to-3 point lead with just over a week to go in the 2012 campaign, thanks to Ryan’s homeboy status and the general skepticism of working-class white voters that has hit Obama nationally.

That’s where a quirk of 1970s election law comes in. Wisconsin — along with the battlegrounds of New Hampshire and Colorado — allows voters to register at the same time they cast ballots. In 2008, a juggernaut Obama campaign used the law to maximum effect, encouraging hundreds of thousands of new voters, many of them incipient Democrats, to take advantage of the law.

A Democratic operative with experience in national and Senate races estimated that the same-day law could add up to 2 points to Obama’s tally this year.

Obama’s brain trust is even more sanguine. “Twelve percent of 2008 voters registered on Election Day,” a senior Obama campaign official said Friday. “So, if you win those voters 60/40 or 65/35, which is not unrealistic for us, you take that net 30 percent gain, multiply it by 12 — it’s 3.5, 4 points that we can expect to gain on Election Day in Wisconsin.”

Republicans say that tally is wildly exaggerated. They think the drop-off in the enthusiasm for the incumbent, coupled with an energized and organized GOP organization — battle-tested after Walker’s successful defeat of a union-backed recall election — will neutralize the same-day effect this year.

Still, Republicans have pushed for the law to be repealed.

One-time state GOP chairman Reince Priebus — now the top guy at the Republican National Committee — told the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal recently that scrapping the law “would help keep our elections clean and honest” and make it possible to have an election day “that’s not a complete zoo.”

Will Romney play in St. Paul?

It’s money-where-your-mouth-is time for the Romney campaign.

Recent polls show Romney making big gains among independent voters and working-class women — and his staff confidently predicts his national victory will come as a wave, not a squeaker, with the former Massachusetts governor pulling down 300 or more electoral votes.

Romney’s pollster Neil Newhouse tells POLITICO: “It’s all Obama on defense … our path to 270 has widened, and Obama’s has narrowed.”

That seems to be true: Polls are tightening. But the parsimonious Romney, sitting on a final week cash advantage of $50 million or more, hasn’t acted like a candidate who thinks the race has become truly nationalized.

Senior Romney campaign officials won’t tip their hand heading into the last days, but they have thus far eschewed pumping millions in ad spending into traditional bastions of blue, such as Minnesota, Michigan and Pennsylvania, that have been tightening.

Pennsylvania has a long history of teasing GOP hopefuls with last-minute poll surges before reverting to the Democrats, in Lucy-with-the-football fashion.

But Minnesota, which hasn’t gone red in a presidential year since 1972, might be different: A Star-Tribune/Mason Dixon poll on Sunday showed Romney within 3 points of Obama — in a state Obama won by 10 points last time.

The pro-Romney Super PAC Restore our Future has already poured $1.6 million into the state, and Obama’s team bought about $500,000 in TV time in the Minneapolis-St. Paul media market.

But Romney’s campaign hasn’t yet followed suit, thus far booking a paltry $30,000 in ads in the state for the closing week, according to POLITICO’s Maggie Haberman.

That might change, several Republicans not associated with the campaign surmised — if for no other reason than the self-described cheapskate Romney can get a double bang for his buck by advertising in the Minneapolis market, which bleeds into several battleground counties in neighboring Wisconsin.