Energised Obama woos swing voters

Energised Obama woos swing voters

An energised Barack Obama is seeking to build on his forceful comeback in the second presidential debate, honing his pitch to female voters in hopes of recovering ground he had lost to Mitt Romney after their first face-off.

The combative town-hall event on Tuesday night was watched by about 65.6m people, only slightly fewer than watched the first debate, Nielsen, the audience measurement group, reported on Wednesday.

At a rally in Mount Vernon, Iowa, Mr Obama referred to some of his better received lines from the night before.

“Everyone here has heard of the new deal, the fair deal, the square deal? Mitt Romney is trying to sell you a sketchy deal,” Mr Obama said to wild applause from his supporters.

With his sleeves rolled up and his tie loose, the president mocked his rival for an awkwardly phrased line in the debate. Answering a question about equal pay for women, Mr Romney touted his record as governor of Massachusetts by saying he had received “whole binders full of women” to help him recruit qualified females. The line quickly went viral on the internet.

Mr Obama said: “We don’t have to collect a bunch of binders to find qualified talented women.”

The candidates now appear to be locked in a surprisingly tight battle for female voters, a constituency comprising 53 per cent of the electorate. Mr Obama had long enjoyed a double-digit advantage among females, and won the demographic by a 13-point margin in 2008, but recent polls have suggested Mr Romney had narrowed that to almost nothing.

At a rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, on Wednesday, Mr Romney asserted that women had fared especially poorly in Mr Obama’s economy, and highlighted the plight of single mothers who were “wondering how they are going to put food on the table at the end of the week and scrimping and saving to be able to do so”.

“What they speak about is, help me find a job, or a job for my spouse,” Mr Romney said. “That’s what the women of America are concerned about and the answers are coming from us, not from Barack Obama.”

Tuesday’s debate was considered a crucial test for Mr Obama, who has suffered a sharp decline in the polls since the first face-off against his Republican rival two weeks ago.

Although most polls now suggest the race is close, Gallup’s daily tracking poll on Wednesday put Mr Romney’s support among likely voters at 51 per cent, while Mr Obama’s was only 45 per cent.

No candidate has been above 50 per cent in the history of the Gallup poll at this point in the race and lost, but the Obama campaign will be hoping that his performance will inject fresh momentum into his re-election bid with 19 days to go. It will take a week for the full effect of the debate to show in the Gallup poll.

Obama campaign officials on Wednesday said the structure of the race “was established”, with the president holding a slender lead in battleground states such as Ohio, where Mr Obama arrived after the Iowa rally.