News from the Votemaster

It has now come out that companies Bain Capital invested in pioneered outsourcing jobs overseas. From Bain's perspective, this may have cut costs and helped these companies become profitable again, but it is going to lead to a spate of ads from President Obama's team that we don't need the Outsourcer-in-Chief in the oval office. At the very least, it will put Mitt Romney on the defensive.

Rich Republicans have donated tens of millions of dollars to SuperPACs already and they will have donated hundreds of millions by the end of the campaign. Many of the donations come from the finance, oil, and real estate industries. In contrast, Democratic-aligned superPACs are getting very few donations. It is not that there aren't any wealthy Democrats. There are, in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and among the trial lawyers, but so far they are keeping their wallets closed. Part of the problem is that, in principle, Democrats don't like superPACs, but they are also less well organized. There is nothing on the Democratic side like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, which has raised $70 million. Democrats are now trying to play catch up, but they are way behind and unlikely to ever reach parity,

Obama's move to halt deportations of illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children if they finished high school or served in the Armed Forces is paying off. His speech to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials got a strong reaction from the crowd, far more than Romney's speech on Thursday did. A new poll in five battleground states show Obama with huge leads among Latino voters. In Arizona it is 56%, in Colorado it is 48%, in Florida it is 16%, in Nevada it is 49%, and in Virginia it is 31%. The poll was taken June 12-21, much of it before Obama's immigration decision, so his edge in these states is probably larger now.

A new Gallup poll shows that just 34% of Americans believe President Obama is a Christian while 11% think he is a Muslim. About 44% don't know what his religion is. Now remember, in the Spring of 2008 there was an enormous controversy about Rev. Jeremiah wright, the pastor of the church Obama went to in Chicago. Republicans attacked Obama asking why he went to a church for 20 years with such a hateful pastor.

The real message here has nothing to do with churches or even Obama. After there being months of stories in the news about Obama attending a church with a hateful pastor, how could anyone not know Obama is a Christian? Muslims, Jews, and atheists generally don't attend church for 20 years. The bottom line here is that a large majority of Americans don't follow the news and are woefully ignorant about politics. This is why Romney thinks he can get away with an Etch-A-Sketch campaign: half the people don't even know what he said in the primaries, so when he changes his views now, they don't even notice.