Pollsters

“Don't get too worked up about the latest polling,” Mitt Romney's top pollster says in a memo   sent to reporters and the campaign's donors. “Some voters” may be experiencing a “sugar-high from the conventions,” pollster Neil Newhouse wrote. “The basic structure of the race has not changed significantly. The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama Presidency.” Memos of that sort usually backfire - the fact that a campaign feels the need to publicly trumpet its lack of worry generally gets taken as evidence of the opposite.

President Obama slammed Mitt Romney's campaign Wednesday for a controversial ad about changes in welfare policy, saying the newly minted GOP nominee “will not let the fact checkers get in the way” of a political attack. Obama cited a remark by Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, who told reporters that Romney's campaign would not be swayed by independent fact checkers who concluded the ad was highly inaccurate. The ad claims that Obama ended the work requirement for people who receive welfare.

WASHINGTON - With his running mate in place and his nominating convention looming, Republican Mitt Romney narrowly trails President Obama, according to a new nationwide poll of likely voters. Obama leads 48% to 45% among all registered voters in the survey and by 48% to 46% among those considered likely to vote, according to the USC Annenberg/Los Angeles Times poll on Politics and the Press. While those results are within the poll's margin of error, they speak to the remarkable stability of the presidential race, in which Obama has held a small lead in most polls since April.

WASHINGTON - The economy is in the tank and hopes for quick improvement are dim. Most people don't like the direction the country is headed and many blame President Obama. And his GOP rival scores better on the top issues. So why isn't Obama doing worse in the polls? One likely reason: Voters like him more than Mitt Romney. Obama's job approval ratings long ago plummeted from his halcyon postelection days. But the president's favorability - the catchall measure that pollsters say reflects voters' gut feelings about a politician - has been resilient.

MEXICO CITY — Pollsters say many Mexicans haven't made a final decision on whom to support in the July 1 presidential election, leaving a debate Sunday as perhaps the last chance to shake up a race so far dominated by the former ruling party. In a get-together with foreign correspondents, four top Mexican pollsters agreed Thursday that former Gov. Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, remains solidly in front of his two main rivals. The analysts said Sunday's televised debate, the second and probably last with all four candidates, could place new focus on leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who is now second in most polls and has closed the gap slightly with Peña Nieto in recent weeks.

WASHINGTON -- Few strategists watch American politics with greater sophistication than Peter D. Hart. In addition to his work for Democratic candidates, the Washington-based pollster has been conducting opinion surveys for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal since 1989. He's one of the rare individuals in politics whose judgment is respected by insiders in both parties. So, when he has something to say, he's well worth paying attention to. Hart has just sent out his preview of the 2012 election, now less than six months away.

After months of gyrating front-runners and inconclusive voter tests, a victory by Mitt Romney in the looming Florida primary would send the 2012 campaign down a well-worn path — pointing the most established GOP contender toward a highly competitive race against President Obama in the fall election. If Newt Gingrich wins, the contours of the battle would be radically different: a prolonged intraparty struggle unlike any the GOP has seen in decades, pitting the former House speaker as an insurgent force against many present and former elected officials he once led, with unpredictable consequences in November if he is the nominee.

A clear majority of likely voters in Los Angeles favor transferring control of struggling LA/Ontario International Airport from the city to a municipality in the Inland Empire, a new public opinion survey shows. The poll, which is part of a political strategy by the city of Ontario to wrest ownership of the facility from Los Angeles World Airports, is largely directed at Los Angeles City Council members and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who have resisted the idea in the past.

Reviving an idea they floated last year with an op-ed urging President Obama not to seek a second term, pollsters Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen are out Monday with a new op-ed drafting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to be the Democrats' 2012 nominee. Obama should “abandon his candidacy for reelection in favor of a clear alternative,” Caddell and Schoen wrote in Monday's Wall Street Journal, because “the kind of campaign required for the president's political survival would make it almost impossible for him to govern -- not only during the campaign, but throughout a second term.” “Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor -- one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president's administration, who has  the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy,” they wrote of Clinton.

Andre Pineda, a Democratic pollster and expert on the burgeoning clout of Latino voters, died this week. He was 46. He died Tuesday after jumping off Pasadena's Colorado Street Bridge. Pineda, a native of South Pasadena, built an international campaign practice on the strength of his experience in several facets of electioneering, including direct-mail and field organization as well as opinion polling. His clients included a number of corporations and philanthropic groups along with a roster of Democratic candidates and causes.