Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour on Sunday joined the chorus of Republicans suggesting that Hurricane Sandy could help President Obama and hurt Mitt Romney politically.
“The hurricane is what broke Romney’s momentum,” Barbour said on CNN’s State of the Union. “I don’t think there’s any question about it. Any day that the news media is not talking about jobs and the economy; taxes and spending; deficit and debt; Obamacare and energy; is a good day for Barack Obama.”
On Friday, Republican strategist Karl Rove told The Washington Post that Sandy would help Obama. “If you hadn't had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy. There was a stutter in the campaign. When you have attention drawn away to somewhere else, to something else, it is not to his [Romney's] advantage,” Rove told the paper.
Polls show that voters have an overwhelmingly positive reaction to Obama’s handling of the disaster. An NBC/Marist/Wall Street Journal poll out on Sunday showed that voters give the president a 68 percent job approval for his handling of Sandy.
In addition, a pair of NBC swing state polls released on Saturday found that trend running even stronger in swing states, with 70 percent of likely voters in Florida and 73 percent of likely voters in Ohio approving of Obama’s response.
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