Obama Campaign Officials Off-Message on Romney's Poll Leads

As polls showed Mitt Romney overtaking Obama across the nation and in key swing states like Colorado and Virginia, David Simas, President Barack Obama’s polling director, said Wednesday that if the election were held today, Obama would be “absolutely reelected.”

His comments, made on a Wednesday evening strategy briefing, somewhat contradicted what Marlon Marshall, the Obama campaign’s deputy national field director, said moments before on the webcast.

“Polls will go up, polls will go down,” Marshall said. “This is going to be a very close race.”

Later in the broadcast, Simas declared, “at the end of the day, polls don’t matter.”

Obama is underperforming in swing states he won in 2008 like Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina, and Virginia. If the election were held today, Obama may lose all four of those states. But Simas compared Obama’s 2012 standing in these states to where Democrats stood in those states in 2004.

Simas reminded Obama volunteers online that they had “expanded the map” by putting these states in play in 2008, overlooking how much less enthusiasm there is for Obama in those battlegrounds states than there was in 2008.

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