In the first Gallup poll taken comparing the two candidates expected to face off in the 2012 presidential election, 47 percent of Americans support former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney while 45 percent back pro-abortion President Barack Obama.
Gallup Daily tracking results from April 11-15 show 90 percent of Republicans favor Romney while 90 percent of Democrats back Obama. When it comes to the crucial group of independents who traditionally decide presidential elections, Romney leads 45-39 percent.
“These results are the first from Gallup Daily tracking of registered voters’ general election preferences, which began on April 11 and will be reported daily on Gallup.com on the basis of continuous five-day rolling averages. This initial report is based on interviews with 2,265 registered voters, and highlights the potential closeness of this year’s race, with Romney and Obama essentially in a statistical tie,” the polling firm noted. “Gallup’s previous general election trial heat, from a national poll conducted March 25-26, showed Obama with a slight 49% to 45% lead over Romney.”
The key for Romney is that Republicans appear to be coalescing around his campaign now that Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign and essentially withdrawn from the race for the Republican nomination.
“The Republican results show that despite the rancor and divisiveness of the Republican campaign, the vast majority of Republicans are backing Romney in the head-to-head battle with Obama, as they have in ballot tests earlier this year,” Gallup said.
Gallup also shows Romney has a very slight edge in terms of voter intensity with 80 percent of Romney backers saying they will definitely vote in November compared with 76 percent of Obama supporters.
Still, Gallup indicates the time between the end of the primaries and the November election is long enough for any presidential campaign to change direction.
“History shows that the candidates’ positioning in the spring of an election year is not necessarily good at forecasting the election outcomes,” it said. “For example, in an April 20-22, 1992, Gallup poll, incumbent President George H.W. Bush was ahead with 41% of the vote, compared with 26% for Bill Clinton and 25% for Ross Perot. And in an April 11-14, 1980, poll, incumbent President Jimmy Carter led Ronald Reagan by 42% to 34%, with John Anderson receiving 18% support. Both Bush and Carter, of course, ultimately lost their re-election bids.”
While Obama strongly supports abortion, Romney has earned the endorsements of numerous pro-life groups.
Romney’s home state group — the organization that perhaps knows his conversion to the pro-life perspective and record as former governor of the Bay State better than any — is endorsing him as well. The Massachusetts Citizens for Life Political Action Committee has issued its full endorsement for Romney as he potentially looks to take on pro-abortion President Barack Obama and pro-life group’s in Ohio and Pennsylvania have followed suit.
Romney, earlier this year, called for overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that allowed virtually unlimited abortions throughout pregnancy for any reason and resulted in more than 54 million abortions on unborn children.
Romney made the following statement on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade:
“Today marks the 39th anniversary of one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history, when the court in Roe v. Wade claimed authority over the fundamental question regarding the rights of the unborn. The result is millions of lives since that day have been tragically silenced. Since that day, the pro-life movement has been working tirelessly in an effort to change hearts and minds and protect the weakest and most vulnerable among us. Today, we recommit ourselves to reversing that decision, for in the quiet of conscience, people of both political parties know that more than a million abortions a year cannot be squared with the good heart of America.”
Romney has also called for stopping federal funding of the Planned Parenthood abortion business.
“I also feel that the government should cut off funding to Planned Parenthood,”said. “Look, the idea that we’re subsidizing an institution that provides abortion, in my view, is wrong. Planned Parenthood oughta stand on its own feet and should not get government subsidy.”
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Romney also touted his pro-life credentials, saying, “I am a pro-life individual, I was a pro-life governor, I served as a pro-life governor, I’m a pro-life candidate. I simply do not want to participate in anything that takes the lives of an unborn child.”
Romney has called for de-funding Planned Parenthood previously. In November, Romney had an opinion column in USA Today in which he advocated numerous ways to balance the federal budget, one of which involves eliminate funding to Planned Parenthood.
The Susan B. Anthony List praised Romney for having pledged last year in a column he wrote for the conservative magazine National Review, to take multiple pro-fie actions as president to reverse abortion and abortion funding.
“Previously, Governor Mitt Romney has pledged to defund Planned Parenthood, restore the Mexico City Policy, support legislation to ban abortions based on fetal pain, and appoint only constitutionalist judges to the federal bench. Governor Romney has also committed to selecting a pro-life vice president,” the SBA List of the candidate most believe will become the Republican nominee.
The column at National Review outlined his pro-life stances on various key issues voters are considering in selecting a Republican nominee to replace pro-abortion President Barack Obama. Romney says:
I am pro-life and believe that abortion should be limited to only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. I support the reversal of Roe v. Wade, because it is bad law and bad medicine. Roe was a misguided ruling that was a result of a small group of activist federal judges legislating from the bench.
I support the Hyde Amendment, which broadly bars the use of federal funds for abortions. And as president, I will support efforts to prohibit federal funding for any organization like Planned Parenthood, which primarily performs abortions or offers abortion-related services.
I will reinstate the Mexico City Policy to ensure that nongovernmental organizations that receive funding from America refrain from performing or promoting abortion services, as a method of family planning, in other countries. This includes ending American funding for any United Nations or other foreign assistance program that promotes or performs abortions on women around the world.
I will advocate for and support a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.
And perhaps most importantly, I will only appoint judges who adhere to the Constitution and the laws as they are written, not as they want them to be written.
If I have the opportunity to serve as our nation’s next president, I commit to doing everything in my power to cultivate, promote, and support a culture of life in America.
Obama has put together a strongly pro-abortion record — promoting abortion and taxpayer funding of abortions throughout his time in the White House.
From taxpayer funding of abortions in America and around the world, to the funding of the creating and destruction of human life in embryonic stem cell research with your tax money; from the absolute refusal to cut off public funding to Planned Parenthood to the stacking of the Supreme Court and federal courts with hardcore abortion advocates, pro-life groups say Obama has left every unborn child behind.
During his first week in office, Obama wasted no time in overturning the Mexico City Policy that President Bush put back in place after it was scrapped during the Bush administration. The Mexico City Policy requires the more than 600 groups that receive State Department taxpayer funding to pledge not to promote or perform abortions with it. Abortion advocates objected to the measure for years during the Bush administration because they want to use the funds to do abortions overseas or lobby pro-life nations to reverse their laws against unlimited abortions.
Obama legally had the right to divert the funding, but his administration appears to have also broken the law to promote abortion overseas.
A November 2011 GAO report looking into the Obama Administration’s use of $18 million in taxpayer funds to provide funding for a group pushing legalized abortion in Kenya found the administration broke the law.
The report showed at least one Obama grantee openly pushed to expand abortion in Kenya despite a long-standing, annually renewed law that prohibits U.S. tax dollars from being used to lobby for or against abortion in other countries. The GAO report also reveals that a key Obama official stonewalled investigators and refused to cooperate with the GAO in its investigation of the activities.
Congressman Chris Smith said “The Obama Administration basically hired surrogates to do its dirty work of abortion promotion in Kenya. This new report shows that at a minimum the Obama Administration ignored the prohibition with the end result being a new Kenyan constitution that vastly expands access to abortion in Kenya, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.”
Not long after he doled out money to Planned Parenthood, Obama sent more than $50 million to the UNFPA. That’s the agency that works hand in hand with the population control regime in China that enforces the one-child policy with human rights abuses like forced abortions and coercive sterilizations.
The third major decision Obama made after the Mexico City Policy was to overturn the limits President Bush put in place to ensure Americans don’t pay for embryonic stem cell research.
Despite the fact that they still don’t work in animals without causing tumors or immune system rejection issues, despite the fact that scientists and even top cloning and embryonic research firms are abandoning the field in droves, and despite the fact that adult stem cells continue to be the only vehicle for cures for patients for more than 100 different diseases or medical conditions, President Obama continues to make Americans pay millions for the creation and destruction of human beings for research.
Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards is so close to Obama that White House visitor logs in only the first full year of his presidency show the head of the nation’s premier abortion business visited the White House and spent time with Obama administration officials on four occasions. That includes the White House health care summit that led to Obamacare, which funds abortions.
Obama is so beholden to Planned Parenthood that he was willing to shut down the federal government to prevent the Pence Amendment that House Republicans approved from going into law. Speaker John Boehner spent more than an hour lobbying the president to allow it but Obama wouldn’t budge.
The president has also appointed longtime abortion activists to prominent places in his administration and, on judges, Obama’s track record is clear. Sonia Sotomayor and Elaban Kagan, along with dozens of other judicial selections, ardently support abortion.
In January, Obama put in place a mandate that requires religious groups, employers or even Americans who run businesses and find these practices objectionable — to pay for contraception, birth control, sterilizations, and drugs that may cause abortions for their employees. Even after Obama revised his mandate to supposedly shift the burden from the employer to the insurance company – which still means employers have to refer Americans pay the cost in higher premiums – the Obama administration implemented the original mandate.
