foot as 87 lawmakers ushered in by the tea party are now incouple benlts and learning what it s like to be unpopular and face the threat of losing their jobs. a recent poll shows the tea party s favorability is at an all-tyli all-time low, just 32 view they favorable now, down 9 points from two years ago. joining me now is martin cady. 87 freshmen ushered in by the tea party in 2010. they say less is better, back to basics, no spending. how many of these 8 v7 will retn in the 113 you think? the reality is most will returning. some of the place where they re in tubl are suburban, moderate districts. like at westchester county, new york where nan hayworth is running as a moderate, even though she enjoyed the tea party
summer the incumbent money advantage. they have the support of the nrc, the house republican campaign arm. what they don t have as much of is that tea party wave feeling, that grassroots support from folks who will do anything to get the democrat in office out of office. now they re incumbents, and they have to talk up a good game about, hey, i know how to work with the other guy. 2012 is different than 120 when it comes to the popularity of the tea party. if you re in a close district, you don t want the tea party label on you right now. martin, does this mean let s look farther forward past election day. are we seeing them gel? is that a possibility here? that is the other thing happening. republicans argue they don t need to talk to the tea party as a separate entity anymore, and it s the house republican agenda right now. there s not a lot of daylight
between them now. it s lower taxes and smaller government and the ryan budget. they ve actually melded nicely, but what happens here at election time is that some of these moderates are going to get left out in the cold, if not lose on election day. martin cady, thank you so much from politico. thank you. now the for the news nation political postscript. it was dominated by coverage of the second presidential debate, which everyone agreed the president needed to win. going into the debate it was secretary of state hillary clinton who grabbed headlines with her statement about the attack on the u.s. consulate in libya. take a listen. i take responsibility, i m in charge of the state department. secretary clin ton has done n extraordinary job. she works for me and i m the president and i m always responsible. you said in the rose garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? is that what aur saying. please proceed, governor. i want to make sure we get that fo
0 latest numbers. are we seeing a tightening of the women vote when it comes to the two candidates? richard, the majority of polls that i ve shown that a gender gap does persist where president obama has a double-digit lead among women, mitt romney with a lead among men. the obama campaign, to be able to win, to hit all their demographic marks, they need to win women by double-digits. i think that s a guidepost for everyone to watch election night. that will give us a good indication on who wins and who doesn t. a lot to watch there. mark murray, thank you so much. joining me right now is david goodfred here with us, erin mcpike reporter from real claire politics and also michael smurkonish. david, i want to start with you. we were discussing the firewall with mark murray. say, wait a second, where s the hometown base. it ain t showing up. that to me establishes further this notion of a firewall in the upper midwest. it might be what we learn right now in terms of jobs. this came
270 electoral votes. the romney campaign thinks they have a better standing in iowa which our polls suggest which could complicate that midwest firewall for president obama. 18 days ago, the nail-biter is just right. what about new hampshire? in new hampshire i think it s also going to be a really close race. you look at almost all of the battlegrounds, richard, that are out there right now, and i think we ll talk about a very, very late election night. we were just breaking down the 269-269 electoral vote college tie a couple of days ago. we all need to be prepared for something that s going to take us into november 7th, maybe even beyond. that would be a long night for you, my friend. what s behind the discrepancy with the numbers we ve seen so far in the polls, though? well, the one thing you look at our nbc/ wall street journal /maris poll of iowa, we show 34% of likely voters say they ve already voted, and president obama is winning by a very wide margin. when