Swing State

WASHINGTON - Stirring the lingering debate over storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, President Obama tapped Yucca critic Allison Macfarlane as the new chairwoman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The nomination of Macfarlane, an associate professor at George Mason University in Virginia who has written extensively on Yucca Mountain, is sure to be a lightning rod in the Senate, setting up a confirmation showdown. Republicans in Congress continue to lead the fight against Obama's decision to halt development of the nation's nuclear dump 90 miles north of Las Vegas.

Two of the states are familiar bellwethers, the third a relative newcomer to the swing-state category. For either Mitt Romney or President Obama, a clean sweep would guarantee victory on election night. And, for the moment, it's Obama with the advantage in Ohio, Florida and Virginia, according to a new round of polls from NBC News and Marist. In Florida and Virginia, Obama leads 48% to 44%. In Ohio, Obama's lead is 48% to 42%. The margin, though, has narrowed in each state since Romney essentially clinched the Republican nomination and will probably continue to fluctuate as both campaigns start honing their general election messages there.

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio - Vice President Joe Biden and unofficial Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney skirmished over the economy and their ability to improve it in swing-state appearances Wednesday that underscored each side's positioning on the key issue in November's general election. Biden and other Democrats are seeking to disqualify Romney in the minds of voters as an alternative to President Obama. Polls consistently have found that voters give Romney better marks for his potential handling of the economy than they give Obama for dealing with it. Romney and other Republicans have long criticized the president's moves on the economy.

DES MOINES - Returning to the state that launched Barack Obama to the presidency, Mitt Romney on Tuesday accused his rival of carelessly driving the country into "a financial crisis of both debt and spending that threaten what it means to be an American. " The presumptive GOP nominee's stop in the Hawkeye State, which he largely ignored before its first-in-the-nation caucuses in January, reflected the importance Iowa will play in selecting the next president. Though there has been little recent public polling in Iowa, both sides clearly see a competitive race here - made clear by the fact that Romney's visit came three days after one by the vice president's wife, Jill Biden.

PITTSBORO, N.C. - With voting already underway for Tuesday's primary in this moderate Southern state, the discourse has been dominated not by candidates, but by a bitterly contested measure known as Amendment 1. If approved, it would be among the most restrictive of the marriage amendments passed in 30 states. It would amend the state's constitution to specify: "Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this state.

WASHINGTON - A hard-hitting commercial blasting President Obama's stimulus spending as a "failure" flooded television sets last week in eight swing states that will be decisive in November's presidential election. It was not the product of presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney, nor of the national Republican Party. Instead, it was made by Americans for Prosperity, a Virginia-based nonprofit that for months has poured millions into anti-Obama commercials. Its latest buy totaled $6.1 million in airtime.

The consensus in polling this week is that jobs and the economy are the top concerns for voters in the presidential election. And if that's the case, there was mixed news for the White House in the release of new state-by-state unemployment data on Friday. Overall, the unemployment rate went up in eight states, held steady in 12 and dropped in 30 from February to March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The five biggest declines came in Oklahoma and Mississippi (down 0.6%)

A new Gallup poll shows that President Obama has opened up his largest lead over Mitt Romney to date, both nationally and among voters in a dozen key November battlegrounds. Obama's 51% to 42% lead among registered voters in 12 "swing states" is his first over Romney in the USA Today/Gallup poll . Romney led in those states 48% to 46% in the previous survey in mid-February. Driving that advantage is a significant gender gap. The two are statistically tied among men, with Romney's 48% to 47% lead within the margin of error.

President Obama plans to set off Wednesday on a Western tour passing through one of the reddest states in the union, where he will try to turn the Keystone pipeline story into a positive tale about his overall energy policy. On the way to Oklahoma - the starting point of the southern half of the controversial pipeline - Obama plans to highlight the approval of dozens of oil pipelines during his time in office. Although the full Keystone line from Canada to Texas failed to get a permit earlier this year, the company is moving forward with the southern portion.

Are political centrists in America without a political home? Do we need a third-party presidential candidate to represent those socially progressive, fiscally austere voters who find our two parties too extreme? There's no disputing that the Republican Party continues to move rightward at warp speed. Virtually every GOP elected official who's been in office for more than a couple of years has had to repudiate previously mainstream Republican positions (such as creating a health insurance system with an individual mandate, an idea cooked up by a right-wing think tank)