- Shanna Gillette
- President Obama speaking at HCC
The re-election team for Barack Obama has a number of different scenarios that show how the president can get to 270 electoral votes in November. Not every scenario includes getting Florida and its 29 electoral votes, but Obama's chances would certainly be greater for a second term if he did win those votes.
On Friday afternoon inside the gymnasium of the Hillsborough Community College main campus in Tampa, the president told the 2,500 people gathered for his speech that his vision for the country has been blocked by a stalemate in Congress.
This isn't a run-of-the-mill stalemate, he said, but "the defining issue of our time. The outcome of this decision, this course, is entirely up to you. It's up to you, the people of Tampa, the people of Florida, the American vision."
According to a Quinnipiac poll taken earlier this week, Obama leads Mitt Romney by a 47-43 percent margin. That was a reversal of a month before in the same survey, where he trailed the former Massachusetts governor by seven percentage points, and was also part of the same survey that showed that a majority of Floridians favor Rick Scott's controversial purge of non-voters and the Stand Your Ground law.
This article appears in Jun 21-27, 2012.