Swing States Going To Obama, Bill Clinton Says

Swing states will turn solidly to Barack Obama in the upcoming election, Bill Clinton predicts.

In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Clinton said he doesn’t think the race is nearly as close as media pundits are making it out to be.

If Obama can perform roughly equally to Mitt Romney in the upcoming presidential debates, he will definitely win the election, Bill Clinton added.

Clinton said:

“I think that assuming the debates are even a draw, I think the president will win. But I think you can’t know because of the enormous financial advantage that Citizens United gave to these Republican Super PACs and because of the work they have done and will do on Election Day to try to reduce the number of young people, first generation immigrants, and minorities voting. And they have worked hard at this.”

But Mitt Romney political director Rich Beeson doesn’t see the swing states going so strongly for Obama, the Washingon Post noted.

“Governor Romney is seeing strong support across all the battleground states, including those President Obama won with close to double digit margins or more,” Beeson said.

Clinton, who polls show is immensely popular, has emerged as arguably the most important surrogate for Obama. Clinton said Sunday that he didn’t think that Romney’s comment that “47 percent” of Americans do not pay income taxes amounted to smart politics and offered an rebuttal against the argument.

Clinton also blasted Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments in which the GOP candidate seemed to write off Americans who don’t pay income taxes.

Clinton said:

“But it’s interesting I, you know I know a lot of higher-income people, a lot of whom help me do my work and they’re supporting Governor Romney. And a lot of people say things like that but I think it’s worth pointing out, if you look at that 47 percent, they, first they do pay taxes. They pay Social Security taxes, they pay Medicare taxes, they pay state and local taxes. Second, they are out of the federal income tax pool for two reasons: one is the economic crash which lowered a lot of people’s incomes; even a lot of the newer jobs don’t pay high incomes.”

Political analysts see Bill Clinton‘s assessment of the swing states much closer than Beeson’s. Election analysis sites like Pollster and FiveThirtyEight show the important states of Florida, Ohio, and Virginia tilted toward Obama.