Obama-Romney race tied - Poll
US: Just 48 hours before Election Day, the presidential race for the
White House is tied, with both President Barack Obama and his Republican
challenger, Mitt Romney, receiving 48-percent support among likely
votes, a new poll has found.
The latest ABC News/Washington Post survey also showed Sunday that
even independents, whose decision can push one of the candidates over
the top, are now evenly divided: 46 percent favor Obama and 46 percent
Romney.
Even the candidates’ likability ratings, where the president used to
lead by a wide margin, have practically evened out. Fifty-four percent
of likely voters now express a favorable opinion of Obama while 53
percent do the same about Romney.
But the candidate, according to the poll, fare differently among
various social and ethnic groups.
Obama, for example, leads among women by a margin of six percent
while Romney leads among men by seven percent. Whites favor Romney by a
margin of 20 percent, but Obama leads by a 59-percent margin among
nonwhites.
Like in the 2008 election, young adults favor Obama by a 25-percent
margin while seniors prefer Romney by 12 percent.
And Romney practically owns evangelical white Protestants: he leads
by a 70-percent among this group.
The survey had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three
percentage points.
Twitter, Facebook used to push Americans to polls
Meanwhile, Nani Teruya does not vote because she believes the United
States is illegally occupying her home state of Hawaii, but people are
trying to convince her to go to the polls next week via Google+ and
Twitter.
She is one of six non-voters taking part in a CNN project that uses
social networks to try and persuade people in Hawaii to cast their
ballot in Tuesday’s presidential poll, one of many ‘get-out-the-vote’
initiatives on social media.
The project encourages people to send compelling voting arguments to
the six via Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and by doing so reach other
election-skeptics in Hawaii -- which has one of the lowest voter
turnouts in the US.
“Hawaii in a lot of ways is detached from the rest of the US, it
feels that way,” said John Sutter, a reporter at CNN.com who set up the
‘Change the List’ project.
“But this can forge a connection. Even though geography really
separates that state from the rest, on the Internet, everything is much
closer.” As the election nears, social networks are being used
extensively to try and persuade people of the importance of voting and
even beat the record 2008 turnout, when two-thirds of US voters cast a
ballot in the election.
A project endorsed by First Lady Michelle Obama, for instance,
encourages people to take photos with their kids when they vote and post
them on social networks, to teach the younger generation about the
workings of democracy.
On Foursquare, the location-based social network, users can connect
an app to their account and find the nearest polling station. On
Tuesday, they will be able to see who voted across the United States on
an online map.
And Facebook will reportedly post get-out-the-vote messages Tuesday
to millions of voting-age Americans on the social network.
AFP |
