MIAMI - The unexpected sight of empty seats is unsettling for candidates jockeying for an edge in the race for the White House. At a tightly orchestrated campaign event, it can telegraph trouble — from fading popularity to lack of enthusiasm in a key voting bloc.

There were plenty of empty seats in the Miami Hilton Hotel ballroom on Friday when Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney addressed the Latin Builders Association, an influential group in Florida’s tight Republican nominating race.

The group holds big sway with Florida’s Hispanic voters,
especially Miami’s Cuban-Americans, who make up about 10 percent of the Republican primary voters.

As Romney began his address at around 8:30 a.m., about 170 of the 240 available were filled.

The problem, locals say, is Romney’s hard-line stance on immigration, which goes down poorly with many Hispanic voters.

As Reuters correspondent Tim Gaynor wrote from Palm Beach on Thursday, the issue of U.S. border security and what to do with about 12 million illegal immigrants works in favor of Romney’s top rival in Florida, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

Analysts and Florida voters say McCain’s support for secure borders, a guestworker program and a “compassionate” approach to illegal immigration, has resonated, particularly in south Florida, which has a large Latino community.

Romney’s tougher stance is less popular.

“We’ve got to enforce the law, welcoming legal immigration but ending illegal immigration,” he says at most campaign events.

Neck-and-neck with McCain in polls, Romney made a bid for Hispanic voters in his speech on Friday, recalling how the original $37 million fund for a venture capital firm he founded in 1984, Bain Capital, was raised entirely from private individuals led by Ricardo Poma, a Salvadoran businessman living in Miami.

“What you have done with the city of Miami is transform a city that was old and tired into a city that has become a gateway, or a connection point, between North America and Latin America,” he told the builders association. 

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Joe Skipper (Romney talks with supporters in Miami.)

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. - As the Republican race for the White House tightens, front-runners John McCain and Mitt Romney are looking for a boost from an unlikely ally — former rival Fred Thompson.Romney, the multimillionaire former Massachusetts governor, announced on Thursday his campaign had hired 10 staffers from “Lawyers for Fred Thompson,” a support group that had rallied behind the former Tennessee senator and Hollywood actor.

That came a day after Romney picked up the endorsement of a high-profile Thompson backer, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran.

Not to be outdone, McCain said on Thursday that Thompson’s former national fundraising chairman, Scooter Clippard, had signed up to McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” as a national finance co-chair.

“Fred made an invaluable contribution to this race and always enriched the discussion of ideas for America’s future,” McCain said in a statement.

The skirmish for supporters follows Thompson’s announcement on Tuesday that he had dropped out of the Republican race after finishing third in South Carolina’s primary on Saturday — behind McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Romney, a former venture capitalist, is presenting himself as the most conservative of the bunch in hope of rallying the social, economic and security wings of the Republican Party, whose establishment has clashed with the maverick McCain.

On the campaign trail, he has begun to praise Thompson, saying among other things he will miss his humor at debates. “He is a delightful character,” he said in Tampa on Wednesday.

Later he added, “in some respects his departure from the campaign inures to my benefit. I think some of those people who are really concentrated on all three branches of conservatism will support my campaign.”

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria

JACKSONVILLE, Florida - Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney felt he may have had a little extra help when answering a reporter’s question on one of the most delicate subjects of his campaign — his Mormon faith.

Asked for his view on the influence of religion on the race for the White House after Mormon voters turned out in force in Saturday’s Nevada nomination contest that he won, he replied, “I’ll let other people take a look at those things.”

A loud thunder clap interrupted his next sentence.
“Wow,” he said, looking up. “Maybe HE wants to say something.”

He said exit poll numbers showed that he would have won in Nevada even without Mormon support.

“There will always be some people whose vote will be shaped by the faith of the candidate. I don’t think that is the majority of the people,” he said. “That’s just part of the American experience.”

About 170,000 people in Nevada, or 6.8 percent of its population, are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the formal name of the Mormon religion headquartered in neighboring Utah.

Television networks reported that voter surveys at polls in Nevada showed that Mormons made up 26 percent of those attending Republican caucuses, with 95 percent of them voting for Romney, who won 51 percent of the total Republican vote.

“If not a single Mormon had turned out, Mitt Romney would have still won the caucuses in that state,” said Romney’s spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom.

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- Photo credit: REUTERS/Mark Wallhesier. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at the start of his Florida swing in Jacksonville January 19, 2008, after winning the Nevada primary.

(Corrects spelling of Mormon in 6th paragraph)

MANCHESTER, N.H., -  Republican Mitt Romney is aggressively casting himself in the race for the U.S. presidency as an outsider who will shake up Washington. The former Massachusetts governor has retooled his campaign speech to focus on how he would change and fix a “fundamentally broken” Washington ahead of Tuesday’s primary. Here’s Romney giving a part of that speech to voters gathered at the Bean Towne Coffee House and Cafe in Hampstead, N.H.

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NASHUA, N.H. — Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney often touts a long list of campaign promises on the trail, elaborating at length on each and pointing to a towering “to do” placard onstage that boasts of even more. But on Monday, one issue clearly took him off guard: America’s growing population of cats, dogs and other pets.

“I’d like to ask you a question that has not been asked throughout this whole campaign of any candidate so far,” Karen Bill, executive director of the Humane Society for Greater Nashua, said following the former Massachusetts governor’s speech to local business leaders, where he drew loud applause moments earlier for calling for an end to illegal immigration.

The dining room at the Nashua Golf Club, crammed with several hundred voters and more than two dozen journalists, fell silent.

“There is an extreme overpopulation crisis of pets in this country. Millions upon millions and there’s very few solutions,” she said, before asking how he would resolve the issue “outside of giving each (illegal immigrant) a cat and a dog as they go back home,” she said as the room erupted in laughter.

Romney, who typically fields questions with businesslike efficiency and was tagged earlier in the campaign for stories about putting his dog in a kennel tied to the roof of his station wagon during long family trips, for a moment was clearly stumped.

“I don’t know how many pets there are in this country. I have to be honest with that,” he said. “I was pretty well briefed for the debates the other night,” he added to whoops of laughter.

But he eventually took up the challenge and said he would handle the problem of pets much in the way he tackles other policy issues: he would form a committee, seek outside advice from experts and tackle it seriously.

Bill asked if she could get a job on his White House “pet committee”. Romney agreed. “There are government jobs going here right now,” he added to another round of loud laughter.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Mike Segar

MANCHESTER, N.H. –  Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith may appear to be less of a factor in New Hampshire than it was in the evangelical Christian heartland of Iowa, but it’s still a stumbling block for some voters ahead of the state’s nominating primary on Tuesday.

When asked about his faith at an “Ask Mitt Anything” rally late on Friday, the former Massachusetts governor took a shot at voters who cast their ballots based purely on his Mormonism, likening them to Sunni and Shia groups fighting over religious lines in Iraq.

At the event one woman asked Romney a hypothetical question:

How would he vote if he had to decide between a candidate whose religion was familiar and agreed with her own, and another candidate whose religious beliefs were alien but who had other considerable strengths?

“This is a very theoretical idea, nothing like this exists?” Romney deadpanned to laughter, lightening the room of several hundred people before tackling the question.

“Look at the history of our country and consider the people who have been presidents of the United States and their religious affiliations and heritages and the contributions they have made,” he began before reprising some of the lines from the speech he gave on Dec. 6 on his faith. He said he would want to know if a candidate shared Judeo-Christian values. “Have they manifested those in the way they have live their own life? Do I see that in their relationship in their family?”

“I would not be interested in knowing what do they believe in the timing of the second coming or what sort of clothes will so-and-so be wearing when he comes back a second time. I don’t know if that makes any difference in the scheme of things. And frankly if we were to define differences in candidates based on the peculiarities or the particular natures of each of their faiths and denominations we would end up looking an awful lot like Shi’a and Sunni, where we would be selecting our candidates whether they are in my group or their group.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the sect based in Salt Lake City, Utah, is formally known, is the fourth-largest U.S. religion and one of the richest, with 12.9 million members globally. Many evangelical Christians, a powerful voting bloc in some U.S. states, dismiss Mormonism as a cult.

– Photo credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton

The leadoff voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire are well known for their clout in the presidential race. But exactly how big is their influence? A study released today by Brown University economists said the two states each wield up to 20 times the influence of other states in selecting candidates.

Brown said the study uses statistical model to examine how daily polling data responds to returns from presidential primaries. “Evidence that early voters have a disproportionate influence over the selection of candidates violates ‘one person-one vote’ – a democratic ideal on which our nation is based,” said Brian Knight, associate professor of economics and public policy at Brown.

“The implications go even further, since populations of states such as Iowa and New Hampshire are not exactly representative of the nation in terms of diversity,” he said. Political scientists have argued while Iowa and New Hampshire may not have the same demographic mix as the rest of the country, the states reflect the critical swing voters who have helped decide the last few U.S. elections.

The study said the primary calendar was starting to resemble a “simultaneous primary” with 23 states voting on Feb. 5, which the economists said could make for a tight race. Iowa’s caucus on Jan. 3 opens the state-by-state battle to choose candidates for the November 2008 general election. It is followed five days later by New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 8.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is gaining on rival Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, while Republican Mitt Romney’s lead in the early voting state is stable, according to a new poll by Suffolk University for Boston’s WHDH TV.

Likely voters in New Hampshire’s Jan. 8 Democratic primary, which includes independents, gave 34 percent support to Clinton, while 22 percent backed Obama and 15 percent picked former North Carolina senator John Edwards. Just 12 percent were undecided. Her current 12-point spread contrasts to June when Clinton led Obama by 18 points.

“If Obama could shave off another six points in the next few weeks, he’ll be well within the margin of error – and John Edwards still has a chance to make it a three-person race,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center.

On the Republican side, Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, attracted 34 percent support, compared with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 20 percent, Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 13 percent, Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s 8 percent, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s 7 percent. Fourteen percent were undecided.

A separate poll this month by University of New Hampshire for WMUR and CNN showed Clinton, a New York senator and former first lady, losing some ground but still holding a commanding lead in New Hampshire. That poll, released on Nov. 20, showed Clinton’s lead shrinking to 36 percent from 43 percent in September. Obama, an Illinois senator, was in second place with 22 percent , up from 20 percent.

– Photo credit: Steve Marcus

From America’s thirst for foreign oil to surging oil prices and record oil-company profits, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama says the Bush administration is leading the country down the wrong path. But who’s to blame? The Illinois senator keeps it in the family, blaming his own relative. The “black sheep” in his family, he calls him: U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney and Obama are distant cousins, and Obama played up the link in a stump speech at a high-school in Alton, a town in New Hampshire where the nation holds its first nominating primary, likely Jan. 8.

“We’ve been talking about energy independence since 1973,” he said. “Yet the biggest change since 1973 is that we actually import more oil as a percentage and gas prices have gone up and Exxon Mobile profits have gone up. Why is that? Well it doesn’t help when you put my cousin Dick Cheney in charge of energy policy,” he deadpanned to loud laughter from the several hundred who packed the school’s gym. “You know everybody has a black sheep in the family,” he added.

Accusing the Bush administration of short-changing American schools, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama proposed on Tuesday an $18-billion-a-year education plan that aims to make preschool education more affordable, pay teachers better and put a national priority on teaching science.

Unveiling the plan at a packed high school theatre in New Hampshire, the Illinois senator also pledged to pay the expense of a college education for Americans who commit to a lifetime of teaching.

He said the plan would be financed in part by cutting other federal programs, boosting federal revenue and tapping savings from ending the Iraq war. It would also require a five-year delay in the multibillion dollar Constellation program managed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to return astronauts to moon by 2020, according to a memo provided by Obama’s staff.

It includes a $10-billion “Children First Agenda” to provide care, learning and support for families with children up to five years old, and grants to help states pay for the program. Funding would also be boosted for needy children.

A “Presidential Early Learning Council” would coordinate the effort, he said. Child care tax credits would be expanded to strengthen day-care programs. .A new Service Scholarship program would recruit teachers for overcrowded and struggling school districts. All schools would be accredited to see which produced the best and worst teachers, and a mentor program would be expanded to match new educators with more experienced teachers.

But unlike rival Democratic presidential contender, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, Obama stopped short of calling for the scrapping of the Bush administration’s signature No Child Left Behind law signed in 2002. But he said the policy had serious flaws, lacked proper funding and had demoralized and stigmatized students and teachers.

“That’s what is wrong with No Child Left Behind and that is what we must change in a fundamental way,” he said in the speech at Central High School in Manchester, the largest city in the state that holds the first presidential nominating primary.

(Photo: Democratic presidential candidate U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) shakes hands with a member of the audience following a speech about education reform in Manchester, New Hampshire November 20, 2007. REUTERS/Brian Snyder (UNITED STATES) )