NEW POLL RESULTS – AT 9:44 A.M. ET:  We have been following, with some dismay, results of this week's Rasmussen polling.  We regard Rasmussen as reliable because he polls likely voters, and has never loaded his polls in favor of Democrats.

Earlier this week, as we've pointed out, Rasmussen had Romney up by four.  Then Romney started to slip, and is now down by two. 

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows President Obama attracting support from 45% of voters nationwide, while Mitt Romney earns the vote from 43%. Five percent (5%) prefer some other candidate, and seven percent (7%) are undecided.

This is the lowest level of support for Romney since March. So far, in the month of August, support for both Romney and Obama has stayed in a very narrow range between 43% and 47%. See daily tracking history.

Romney is supported by 86% of Republicans, while Obama gets the vote from 84% of Democrats. The president has a 10-point edge among unaffiliated voters.

COMMENT:  Only two things happened this week that might have produced this Romney downturn - the selection of Paul Ryan, and the mainstream media's focus on Romney's refusal to release more tax returns.

Whatever the reasons, the results aren't good.  The deficit among unaffiliated voters – independents – is a killer, and is particularly distressing.

As we've also noted, this result is not showing up in the daily Gallup tracker, which continues to show Romney two points ahead.

We must regard these results more as a failure of the Romney campaign to connect than as any success for Obama/Biden, which hasn't had much success recently.  We must also note that most Americans continue to get their news from the mainstream media, which is doing its job for the liberal cause.  From Weekly Standard:

"The Obama folks clearly know they've found some traction on this tax return issue with Romney," said NBC's Lester Holt. "And then of course late in the week comes this challenge--'give us a little more and we won't complain anymore.' Has this issue come to the point it's jumped the shark?"

"I think the press still likes this story a lot, the media is very susceptible to doing what the Obama campaign wants, which is to focus on this," said Halperin.

COMMENT:  The big guns haven't begun to fire yet.  That will occur after the conventions.  But we've said repeatedly that press bias will be a major factor in this election, as it was in 2008.  Republicans must learn the Reagan method of overcoming it – speaking directly to the public, over the heads of the "journalists."

August 18, 2012