It has taken months of bad news, but Democrats increasingly believe that President Obama might just lose his re-election bid.
The latest wake-up call comes in the form of a New York Times/CBS poll showing Republican Mitt Romney in the lead not just among registered voters overall, but with women and independents.
The Times/CBS survey is unique in that the pollsters called back the same phone numbers they had a month before. In April, Obama and Romney were dead even. Now, Romney leads by 3 points overall. That’s still within the margin of error -- a statistical tie.
But the shifts with women, moderates and independents are all statistically significant. Obama lost 5 points with each of those demographics.
Team Obama has for months been warning Democrats not to be overconfident and warning of a close election, with the president increasingly sounding the alarm for donors and activists in recent campaign appearances.
Since the general election season kicked off in earnest in the last week of March, Obama has had an almost unbroken string of losing weeks, starting with his overheard conversation with former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
There was the back-and-forth with the Supreme Court over his health law, the attack by one of Obama’s advisers on Ann Romney, the GSA Vegas scandal, the hookers in Cartagena and then the baffling case of the gay marriage half-reversion.
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