day by 74/23. anyway the race for colorado tighteninged. why has it become such a close race? romney has gained among key groups since we last polled a month ago by 14 points a month ago, 54/40. it s been cut in half and the president only leads by 7 points. now, the president led independents, 50-39. now, that 11-point margin is a virtual draw and romney is up a point among independents. leader of the marist poll joins me now. colorado, we sit here, we talk about ohio, lee, we talk about but colorado, tell me this, what was the raw vote difference between the two because obviously statistically 48/48, a total tie? single digits. one handful. i think what s interesting, we talked about ohio throughout the campaign as being the bellwether, but, you know, obama is sort of getting in ohio what
hey there, i m veronica de la cruz. california drivers are paying $4.23 a gallon, 45 cents more than the average. 400 more cases of west nile along with 16 deaths. nearly 4,000 have been sickened with 163 deaths. meningitis outbreak that began in tennessee has he can spanded to five states. four people have died. let s get you back to hardball . welcome back to hardball and live from denver. mitt romney and president obama are 90 minutes from the beginning of the debate tonight. their vps have been in the
i m hampton pierson. the dow falls to 69, standard and poor s at 4.23 and the nasdaq dropped. housing prices slipped 1.1% in february while building prices surged more than 5%. after the closing bell, oracle said it earned 62 cents a share in the third quarter, beating analyst estimates. that s cnbc first worldwide. now back to hardball. big political story tonight. welcome back to hardball. polls in illinois will be closed at 8:00 eastern and the contest between romney and santorum is getting more and more heated. romney called santorum an economic lightweight and
right now it s $4.23, down three cents, not bad, although it s little comfort for the drivers in manhattan, but it does take a while for these drop in crude oil prices to their way to the gas pumps. it takes a while to get it through the system, but also the same factors that pushed the prices higher are still in place. we have a weak dollar which makes it expensive to buy crude. we have unrest in the arab world, and demand from growing economies such as china and india. that hasn t changed, shep. shepard: the hedge funds hoarded silver. that crashed. if they dump the oil, it will go down, too, there s no doubt about it. but except for the floods on the mississippi river. i ve heard that could affect prices. it certainly could. there s major oil refineries along the mississippi, including those belonging to shell and exxon, just to name a couple, and if the floodwaters become more of a problem, not that far
a gallon of regular, and in the last ten minutes, my oh my, it s plummeted to 4.23! so a bright spot perhaps. jenna: you actually saw them move the number on the board there ashley? i wonder whether it was for our benefit. we actually go is go from 4.26 to 4.23 but the national average is 3.96, so the poor drivers in manhattan, still paying a premium. jenna: as we re talking about these analysts, the nameless analysts that talk about the oil markets, one of the things that they re saying could cause a drop, as you mentioned mentioned ashley is a big drop in oil prices and late last week we saw a huge drop, the biggest in 2 1/2 years, oil trading below $100 a barrel. why did that happen? well, a number of reasons but i think there was profit taking, people getting out of oil once it reached a certain level and we saw unemployment levels, the unplaiment right, the number of people finding jobs went up, the unemployment rate itself was up to 9 percent