Elections 2012

The campaign calm after the storm is about to end.

Both President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, will be out stumping for votes today. The race for the White House, which was just about put on hold as Superstorm Sandy bore down on the East Coast and then roared ashore, is back on with just five days to go before Election Day.

Romney will be in Virginia. The president will be in Wisconsin, Colorado and Nevada.

On Wednesday, President Obama toured some of the hardest-hit parts of New Jersey, along with Republican Gov. Chris Christie. The two have become a political odd couple since the storm — each offering praise for the other's leadership.

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If there is any political effect from a Republican governor touring his state with a Democratic president, it may simply be this: three entire days have passed in which politicians finally failed to turn a major national issue into a full-blown depressing partisan fight. As the two men did their jobs, of course, the political debate did continue about disasters and everything else - as you'd understand. It is election time. Republican Mitt Romney resumed campaigning yesterday in Florida. Here's NPR's Ari Shapiro.

The battleground state of Wisconsin has a higher percentage of older voters than the national average. Recently, it's also had a volatile political history, including an effort to recall the governor. Older voters at the Middleton Senior Center discuss their experiences and the issues driving their decisions now.

Though Superstorm Sandy destroyed much in its path, it did apparently build at least one bridge, that of bipartisanship between President Obama and New Jersey's Republican Gov. Chris Christie.

Christie, a strong ally of Mitt Romney, the GOP presidential nominee, and a key critic of the president before the storm, has had little but praise for Obama for the assistance provided to New Jersey leading into the epic storm, which hit this week.

An attorney for Republican interests asked a federal court today to scrap the map for the new legislative districts.

If you're using social media to follow the presidential campaign or even if you're related to someone else who's doing that, there's a good chance your cellphone got spammed Tuesday night with an anti-Obama text message.

The messages went out between 7:30 and 10 p.m. They were anonymous but quickly traced to a Republican consulting firm in Northern Virginia.

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Among the hundreds of races underway for seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, one of the most expensive and nastiest is in a district on Florida's Atlantic Coast. Although he's just a freshman, Republican Allen West is known nationally for his Tea Party conservatism, his frequent appearances on Fox News and his provocative statements. He once called House Democrats members of the communist party.

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And in the presidential race this week, the focus in the pivotal state of Ohio has been on the federal bailout of General Motors and Chrysler. President Obama backed it. Mitt Romney opposed it, and the Romney campaign is running some controversial ads on the subject in Ohio.