Enjoying post-DNC bounce, Obama campaigns Thursday in Golden

DENVER – President Barack Obama will make his first post-convention campaign stop in Colorado this Thursday with a rally in Golden, right smack in the middle of Jefferson County, one of three suburban metro area counties that will likely determine who wins this state’s nine electoral votes and, perhaps, the White House.

The rally will take place at the Golden Community Center in Lions Park at 11 a.m., the campaign announced Monday morning.

Free tickets are available to the public for pick up starting at 5 p.m. Monday at Obama For America campaign offices in Wheat Ridge, Lakewood, Littleton, Evergreen and Arvada.

Obama enjoys post-DNC bounce

President Obama continues to trend up in the polls following the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. last week.

Monday afternoon, CNN released new numbers showing that Obama has increased his lead over Mitt Romney to six points, by a 52-46 percent margin.

A Gallup survey conducted over the weekend shows Obama leading Republican Mitt Romney by a margin of 50-45 percent. Another poll from Rasmussen, also conducted over the weekend, also shows Obama with a five point edge, leading 52-47 percent.

A story from Politico Sunday quoted top Romney advisers conceding that Obama has “a much clearer path” to reach 270 electoral votes now that Ohio looks to be leaning toward Obama.

Additionally, Obama won a narrow victory over Romney in August’s fundraising numbers, bringing in $114 million last month compared to $111 million for Romney.

It’s the first time in four months that Obama raised more than Romney, although the GOP still sits on a cash advantage that it will look to press by saturating the airwaves in swing states in the final months of this election.

Romney campaign: remain calm

On Monday, the Romney campaign released a memo from its pollster, Neil Newhouse, advising the media and supporters not to “get too worked up about the latest polling.”

“While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly,” Newhouse writes. “The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama Presidency, and Mitt Romney will win this race.”

While the Obama campaign continues to focus on specific constituencies, including women, Latinos and gays and lesbians, the Romney campaign believes that a broader dissatisfaction with the economy will put them over the edge.

Newhouse, in the memo, also points to states that voted for Obama in 2008 that Romney now has the best chance to win (North Carolina and, possibly, Wisconsin) and Obama’s relatively slim, single-digit leads in traditionally blue states (New Jersey and Connecticut).

“The battlefield has actually expanded, not contracted,” Newhouse writes.

Both campaigns saturating Colorado airwaves

Romney is running state-specific TV ads in most swing states aimed at blunting Obama’s post-DNC bounce.

In all of those ads, a selection of Romney’s acceptance speech at the RNC, when he says that Obama cannot tell Americans that country is better off, is played first.

The Colorado ad is state-specific in that it follows that Romney clip with narration that inserts “Colorado” in the script: “Here in Colorado, we’re not better off”; it blames the state’s job losses on Obama’s “over-regulation” and offers that Romney’s promise to create 12 million new jobs in his first term would mean 200,000 jobs for Colorado, spoken by a narrator over video of the Denver skyline.

The Obama campaign is also running an ad in Colorado and other swing stages that cites last month’s study by the Tax Policy Center that asserts that Romney’s proposed tax cut for wealthier would likely have to be paid for by a tax hike on middle class Americans.

Political analyst Eric Sondermann told FOX31 Denver that the ads themselves, however effective, reveal two campaigns with two very different strategies.

“The Romney campaign is running a macro campaign. They have one message, one issue, and that is the economy,” Sondermann said. “The Obama campaign, on the other hand, is trying to slice and dice the electorate into small segments and to appeal to those segments — women, Latinos — individually.”