Forty-eight percent of likely voters said that they viewed the president favorably, compared to 49-percent who had an unfavorable view. That finding is nearly identical to the number who approve of Obama’s job performance, which is split evenly at 49 percent.

The findings reveal that the president can no longer woo voters with his celebrity appeal, which helped propel him into the Oval Office in 2008 despite his scant political experience, according to a panel of political experts who held court Monday on the sidelines of the 2012 Republican National Convention here.

“The Obama people for some reason feel the need to tell people that they’ve moved the country forward and the American people don’t feel that’s the case,” said former Republican Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who helped commission the poll on behalf of Resurgent Republic.

The poll, which surveyed 1,000 likely voters over several days last week, found that Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney are locked in a statistical “dead heat,” with 46 percent favoring the president while 45 percent backed Romney.

Fifty-four percent of those polled believe the country is “not moving forward,” despite Team Obama’s campaign trail rhetoric, according to the survey.

Independent voters are also leaning towards Republicans, according to several metrics tested during the survey.

Self-described independents, for instance, view Democrats in Congress more negatively than Republicans and favor Republicans over Democrats on a generic ballot for Congress, according to the poll.

Most revealing, perhaps, is that independents “think it is time to give someone else a chance to be president” by a 22-point margin, according to the findings.

“It is an uphill climb to persuade the American voters the country is moving forward,” Whit Ayres, a veteran pollster, told a group of reporters, as he explained that a majority of those surveyed felt that they are worse off than four years ago.

President Obama also has a perception problem among most likely voters, the majority of whom self-identify as either “moderate” or “somewhat conservative,” but who largely view Obama as “a candidate of the left,” according to the poll.

Critical independent voters are “twice as likely to view Obama as ‘very liberal,’” the survey revealed.

Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate also seems to struck likely voters as a positive move, the poll found. Ryan has a higher overall favorability rating, 39 percent to 35 percent, while the gaffe-prone vice president, Joe Biden, is viewed unfavorably by 56 percent.

“Ryan was a bold choice and very positive for Romney,” Barbour said. “A lot of people thought Romney would be cautious and risk adverse, [but] … he made a bold statement, that this is a big election and we’re going to go at it as a big election.”

Ryan has also allowed the Romney campaign to speak boldly about issues such as Medicare and the federal budget. 
“Once you get a big gun that’s when you want to start talking about it,” Barbour said. 
Romney has statistically higher favorability ratings than Ronald Reagan did during this point of time in 1980, Barbour added.

“At this time in 1980 Reagan was behind nine [percentage points] so it’s encouraging for me to see these numbers,” he said. Barbour also noted other similarities to the 1980 race between Reagan and incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

“The biggest similarity is that people thought the country had gone backwards under Carter and people think the country has gone backwards under Barack Obama,” Barbour explained. Obama’s “economic policies have made America go backwards. The biggest difference is that Barack Obama … [is] in worse shape than Carter.”

Team Obama is trying to avoid an in-depth discussion about the administration’s record on critical economic issues of the day, Barbour added.

“The Obama campaign knows that if this is a referendum on his record they will lose,” he said. “That’s why they’ve spent all this time and money carpet bombing Romney” on a range of issues, such as tax returns and religion.

On Tuesday, the Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling released a new poll showing Brown leading Elizabeth Warren by five points, 49 to 44 percent. Brown leads Warren 58 to 32 percent among independents. He has also won over 20 percent of Democrats. 54 percent of those polled said Brown is “about right” ideologically, while only 27 percent said the same of the Republican Party.

Independents comprise 48 percent of Massachusetts voters.

“Scott Brown’s been able to hold up his image as a moderate and that has him in a good position right now,” Public Policy Polling president Dean Debnam said in a statement.

Warren’s unfavorability rating in the poll has increased 10 points in the last five months, during which time the controversy surrounding her heritage and academic career badly damaged her campaign while exposing voters to her left-wing policy positions.

Warren appeared Tuesday at a press conference in Boston alongside Center for American Progress Action Fund senior vice president Tara McGuinness and state Rep. Kathi-Anne Reinstein (D., Revere), celebrating the release of a new Center for American Progress (CAP) paper related to the impact of Mitt Romney’s policies on women.

Chaired by Democracy Alliance member John Podesta and funded in part by progressive hedge-fund billionaire George Soros, CAP is a far-left political pressure group and messaging operation that recently found itself mired in an anti-Semitism controversy at the end of 2011.

The Obama White House distanced itself from CAP after an employee of the Center for American Progress Action Fund referred to Israel-supporting Jews as “Israel Firsters,” a term that originated in the white supremacist movement that some consider anti-Semitic, the Washington Post reported earlier this year.

CAP is not the only left-wing interest group trying to influence the Massachusetts Senate race.

Soros himself has donated $5,000 to the Massachusetts Democratic Party State Account, according to records made available Tuesday.

Soros also has numerous links to ProgressNow and Demos, the national liberal political organizations targeting Brown. Soros previously held a New York City fundraiser for Warren.

Brown, meanwhile, spent Tuesday enjoying the second day of his “Scott Brown on the Road: from Provincetown to Pittsfield” tour, as he visits Massachusetts small businesses to tout his fiscal policy credentials.

Brown set off from South Station in Boston and ended up making a detour at George’s Hot Dogs in Taunton, Mass. “I don’t think the government did it for him. I think he did it on his own,” Brown said of the owner of the hot dog stand.

“He came to the General Dynamics facility today and that was a huge success. There were about 300 employees there and everyone wanted to thank him for his work on stopping the reprogramming of funding for the WIN-T program,” Massachusetts state Rep. Shaunna O’Connell, who represents Taunton, told the Free Beacon. The WIN-T program is the U.S. Army communications network for which General Dynamics is prime contractor.

“It was nice to hear someone in the crowd yell out ‘I’m a Democrat and you have my vote!’” O’Connell said.

Brown launched the tour on the heels of his major tax policy speech August 15 at the South Shore Chamber of Commerce, where he discussed Warren’s support for $3.4 trillion in tax hikes.

Warren disputed that the amount of her proposed tax hikes adds up to $3.4 trillion, claiming Brown calculated the figure by holding her accountable for various policies on which she has since changed her position. However, Warren still stands behind a number of tax hikes that would result in at least $1 trillion in new U.S. taxes.

The Warren campaign did not return a request for comment.

The Hill reports:

Surveying 560 U.S. companies, consulting firm Deloitte found that 9 percent of employers are planning to drop employee health benefits within three years. Eighty-one percent said they would continue covering employees, and 10 percent said they were not sure. …

The study found that smaller firms were most likely to say they will drop coverage. Thirteen percent of companies with 50 to 100 workers said they would end policies within three years, compared with 2 percent of companies with more than 1,000 workers.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of Likely U.S. Voters believe that people who start small businesses are primarily responsible for their success or failure. …

Fifty-seven percent (57%) of voters believe entrepreneurs who start small businesses do more to create jobs and economic growth than big businesses or government programs. Sixteen percent (16%) think big businesses do the most when it comes to creating jobs and economic growth. Eleven percent (11%) feel state and local government programs deserve the most credit, while seven percent (7%) think federal government programs have the biggest impact.

Among voters who are not committed to either Mitt Romney or Obama in the presidential campaign, just 13% think government programs are most responsible for economic growth. Fifty-five percent (55%) think entrepreneurs drive growth.

The report follows the president’s controversial remark, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney criticized the president for this statement, and Obama’s campaign released a video claiming that Romney misrepresented his words.

In a campaign where both sides criticize the other as “out of touch” with Americans, Romney’s pro-business ad “These Hands” may resonate with the 72% who give small business owners the credit for their own success.

The survey, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, a European-funded nonpartisan think tank based in Ramallah, queried 1,200 adults in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Asked whom they would support if a presidential election were held today, Marwan Barghouti—a career terrorist and Fatah Party leader jailed since 2002 over his prominent role in directing suicide bombings against Israelis who headed the Tanzim militia and founder of the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades—garnered the most votes.

Israel’s indictment of Barghouti states that he oversaw 37 terrorist attacks that resulted in the murder of 26 Israelis.

In a three-way race between Barghouti, Hamas leader Ismail Haniya, and Mahmoud Abbas (the current president), the vote would be split 37, 33, and 25 respectively. In a direct matchup between Barghouti and Haniya, the former would win overwhelmingly, 60-34.

The survey also found widespread endorsement of terrorism. Asked whether they support “armed attacks against Israeli civilians inside Israel,” 30 percent of West Bank Palestinians and 66 percent of Gaza Palestinians answered in the affirmative. Asked whether Palestinians should respond to the breakdown in the peace process by “return[ing] to the armed intifada and confrontations,” a total of 36.7 percent expressed support, including 53 percent of Gazans.

The Hill reports:

A new poll for The Hill found 56 percent of likely voters believe Obama’s first term has transformed the nation in a negative way, compared to 35 percent who believe the country has changed for the better under his leadership.

The results signal broad voter unease with the direction the nation has taken under Obama’s leadership and present a major challenge for the incumbent Democrat as he seeks reelection this fall. …

It found 68 percent of likely voters — regardless of whether they approve or disapprove of Obama — believe the president has substantially transformed the country since his 2009 inauguration.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows Mitt Romney attracting 48% of the vote, while President Obama earns 44%. Four percent (4%) prefer some other candidate, and another five percent (5%) are undecided. …

Currently, 45% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the president’s job performance. Fifty-three percent (53%) at least somewhat disapprove. … 27% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove, giving him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -15.

The low approval index follows a long trend. Since May 3, it has remained below -10, hitting bottom at -22 on May 12. The approval index has not been positive since June 2009.

On Monday, Rasmussen’s survey showed that Americans want the Supreme Court to strike down Obama’s health care law:

52% of Likely U.S. Voters would like to see the Supreme Court overturn the health care law. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree and want to see the high court uphold the law’s legality instead.

After the debate, a handful of witnesses tell us they saw an altercation between Mrs. [Jan] Rehberg and an attendee, in which the attendee pushed Mrs. Rehberg. Rehberg’s campaign confirmed the incident and say the Rehbergs left immediately afterwards.

Dustin Hurst of Watchdog.org reports that local Democrat Rachel Vaughn, who had “openly and loudly called Rehberg a liar a few times” during the debate, screamed profanities at him and tried to slap his phone out of his hands as he asked her questions.

Montana Democrats may have reason to be feeling desperate. A Rasmussen poll taken in May 2012 has Rehberg leading Tester by double digits.

Negative attitudes towards Mormons have risen since Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney first burst onto the national scene, the research suggests.

BuzzFeed reports on the findings:

The overall increase in anti-Mormon attitudes among liberals may be an unanticipated consequence of the “the continuing candidacy of Mitt Romney and Mormon activism against same-sex marriage,” the study suggests. And its findings may be alarming to the Romney campaign because among the study’s other findings is that voters’ perceptions of Mormonism are closely tied to whether they’ll vote for him.

According to American National Election Studies, nearly 35 percent of national respondents said in February they were “less likely” to vote for a Mormon. That’s up nine points from 2007, when Pew found 26 percent of voters expressing concern about pulling the lever for a Latter-day Saint.

The uptick in anti-Mormon voter attitudes may come as a surprise to those who predicted Romney’s candidacy would have a mainstreaming effect on his faith. But as University of Sydney scholar David Smith, the paper’s author, writes, just as President Obama’s successful candidacy didn’t put an end to tense race relations in America, Romney’s political assent hasn’t cured the country of anti-Mormonism. In fact, as the data shows, Romney’s rise may have lead to increased anxiety about his religion among his natural political opponents.

Gallup found that union member support for the president is weaker than it was on Election Day. While Obama took 67 of the union vote, according to 2008 election night polling by Peter Hart for the AFL-CIO, Gallup discovered that just 58 percent of union members back the president now. Some 35 percent support Mitt Romney, 5 percent more than Sen. John McCain won in 2008.