In the highly charged, relentlessly partisan political climate of today, one only worsened by the ongoing presidential campaign, it is sometimes easy to forget that Romney isn’t exactly the Republican base’s favorite son.  Indeed, in their fervent desire to defeat President Obama, the dislike and distinct distrust that many on the far right have for Governor Romney has been effectively swept under the proverbial rug. If, however, Romney is successful in his quest for the presidency, this unity on the right will likely prove transient.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week found that Romney enjoys the support of white males over President Obama by a margin of 2-to-1: 65 percent to 32 percent. And among working-class whites without college degrees, President Obama trails Romney 58 percent to 35 percent. Why does it matter? White males made up 36 percent of the total electorate in the last presidential contest, and whites in general made up 74 percent of all voters.

In an interview with The Root, Mark Potok, one of the country's leading experts on hate groups, said that the day after President Obama was elected there were so many new people expressing interest in white supremacist groups that websites for some of those groups actually crashed. Among the groups mentioned by Potok, who serves as director of publications at the Southern Poverty Law Center, were Stormfront, a popular online message board for the white supremacist movement, and the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which has been called "the white-collar Klan."

There are close to 400,000 registered Latino voters in the state, up 23 percent from four years ago, according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO). There are a similar number of Mormons living in Arizona, though the community has a longer and more established history of voter turnout. And this year, observers say, Republicans are counting on their vote. 

Black Catholics confront a moral dilemma in the upcoming presidential election: vote with their church or vote with the party that they have long preferred to keep the first African-American president in office four more years. While African-American Catholics are relatively few in number, they may represent enough of the black vote to make a difference in the outcome if they choose to bestow or withhold their support.

In less than two weeks U.S. voters will decide on who they want at the helm of government over the next four years. For many, that decision will be influenced by which candidate, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, promises to be tougher on China. "China bashing" isn’t new to presidential politics here, notes Zhiyue Chen of the Chinese-language Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly).  With the collapse of the Soviet Union and subsequent rise of China, both parties have now honed in on a new "imaginary enemy."

Only three weeks ago, the president spoke at a high school in the heart of the Latino part of town. The hugely popular Mexican rock band Maná also played. More than 11,000 people showed up, some waiting five hours in the near 100-degree heat to get in. Mitt Romney won’t be able to match that enthusiasm among Nevada’s Latinos. But David Damore at UNLV says if Romney can peel away just 10 percent of Hispanic voters, that could make the difference in who wins Nevada. 

"Mali has been taken over, the northern part of Mali, by al-Qaida-type individuals. We have in — in Egypt a Muslim Brotherhood president…." With those words, spoken Monday night by Barack Obama's Republican challenger Mitt Romney just 40 seconds in the last of three debates, Africa was placed at the center of U.S. foreign policy and international security. The radical and pro-al Qaeda sect, Ansar Eddine, and the umbrella group of Tuareg tribal militias known as the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) have since December 2011 worked together to gain control of Timbuktu and most of northern Mali.

It was precisely at the end of eight years of the most recent Republican presidency that the country was brought down to its knees financially. How can a party take a healthy budget surplus, and in just eight years, convert it into the most disastrous financial meltdown seen in over 70 years—if indeed it were the party of wealth creation? (A blind worship of tax cuts even through a costly preemptive war was one factor.) Wealth and enterprise are synonymous with Indian-Americans. Ditto for Jewish Americans, another very prosperous and enterprising community. If the Republican Party were truly the better choice on these counts, why have these two—the wealthiest demographic groups in America—consistently aligned with the Democratic Party? 

Some experts are calling it a tie, while snap polls anoint President Obama as the winner. But the more accurate reading of the second presidential debate is to say simply: Mitt Romney lost. Yes, Obama was “much improved” as one CNN pundit put it, but his re-energised avatar would have been less impressive without Romney’s help. The former governor of Massachusetts committed five key unforced errors that determined the outcome of the debate, each revealing a different (and un-electable) Mitt Romney.