by Chris Hayes Story of the Week, Up w/ Chris Hayes

If you follow politics, you probably noticed that polling of the presidential election has swung quite decidedly in the president's favor over the last few weeks. The Real Clear Politics polling average now has Obama up 4.1 points over Mitt Romney in national polls and Nate Silver's prediction model at his FiveThirtyEight blog put Barack Obama's odds of winning the election above 80% for the first time ever. Swing state polling out just this week seems to confirm the trend. 

 A new Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS poll of swing states of Ohio and Florida, show surprisingly strong leads for Obama. And the Gallup tracking poll, which has showed a near dead heat for almost the entirety of the campaign now shows Obama up 6 points. It's pretty hard to survey the polling data and not come to the conclusion that Barack Obama is beating Mitt Romney, that if the election were held today Barack Obama would win, and that Romney has a relatively steep, though certainly not insurmountable, uphill climb to victory. That is, of course, unless you operate in the alternate epistemic universe of right-wing media.

Bill O'Reilly: That begs the question, are these polls dishonest?
Karl Rove: No we endow them with a false scientific precision they simply don't have.
John Kasich: These polls I don't even pay attention to them...
Dick Morris: Polling is very good at saying how you're gonna vote, its very bad at who's gonna vote, and the models these folks are using are crazy.
Rush Limbaugh: These two polls today are designed to convince everybody this election is over.

We should note that Fox News's own polls have been pretty much in line with everyone else's, but it's not just commentators making the claim that the polls are rigged, the Romney campaign itself is now getting in on the act.

Eric Fehrnstrom: Some of these polls have been called into question because they assume a higher Democratic turnout in 2012 than we experienced in 2008.

For the record that's not true. But that doesn't really matter! Conservatives are spending hundreds, maybe thousands of man-hours (or maybe more appropriately bro-hours) writing long, tortured, pseudo-statistical take downs of every new poll, from a wide variety of outlets.

Katherine Guthrie and Sal Gentile

Tomorrow on Up w/ Chris Hayes, we'll be discussing the Republican bubble trap, highlighted by the recent spate of GOP politicians dismissing national polls showing President Obama ahead of Mitt Romney. We'll also dive into what's behind those poll numbers, and look at evidence that the Obama recovery may be much stronger than the political establishment has realized. And we'll examine the NFL referees debacle in the larger context of the state of organized labor in America.

Joining Chris tomorrow at 8 AM ET on MSNBC will be:

Jamilah King (@jamilahking), news editor for colorlines.com

Mike Pesca (@pescami), sports correspondent for National Public Radio.

Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown (@sherrodbrown), who's currently locked in a closely watched re-election battle.

Joy Reid (@thereidreport), MSNBC contributor and managing editor of TheGrio.com

Bill Fletcher, Jr., co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal and author of "They're Bankrupting Us! And 20 Other Myths about Unions."

Ro Khanna, author of "Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future," former deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce, former member of the White House Business Council.

Josh Barro (@jbarro), lead writer for Bloomberg View's "The Ticker."

Sheila Bair, author of "Bull by Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself," former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (2006-2011), former assistant secretary for financial institutions at the Treasury Department (2001-2002), and former senior vice president for government relations of the New York Stock Exchange.

Joe Weisenthal (@thestalwart), deputy business editor at BusinessInsider.com.

::Blogged by Katherine Guthrie (@kguth1130), production assistant for Up w/ Chris Hayes, and Sal Gentile (@salgentile), segment & digital producer. ::

On a recent trip to Nevada, Up host Chris Hayes sat down with Rep. Shelley Berkley, the Democratic candidate for Senate there. Berkley is challenging Republican Sen. Dean Heller. Chris asked Berkley about the unemployment rate in Nevada -- the highest in the nation -- Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's proposed cuts to Medicare, and Berkley's vote in Congress for the Affordable Care Act.

:: Blogged by Sal Gentile (@salgentile), segment & digital producer for Up w/ Chris Hayes. ::

In an interview Sunday on Up w/ Chris, Romney economic adviser and fundraiser Emil Henry accused President Obama of favoring redistribution of wealth but refused to say whether the Romney campaign would change the tax code to make it less redistributive.

In an interview on Up w/ Chris Hayes Sunday, Emil Henry, an economic adviser and fundraiser for Mitt Romney - and a former assistant treasury secretary during the Bush administration - defended Mitt Romney's secretly recorded comments about the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay income taxes, and said he would "triple down" on Romney's controversial remarks. In those remarks, Romney notoriously said Americans who don't pay income taxes are "dependent" on government and consider themselves "victims."

For a few months after the launch of Up w/ Chris one year ago, it became something of a tradition for Chris to boot the ending to the show every week. To mark our one-year anniversary, our very talented video producer Madeleine Martino Fox put together this fun little blooper reel from the early days of Up. Enjoy, and thanks again for an amazing first year.

by Chris Hayes Story of the Week, Up w/ Chris Hayes

COMMENTARY

The video of Mitt Romney talking to donors that Mother Jones posted last week is an incredible artifact from an entire culture and civilization that exists in our midst, but which we hardly ever get to see: the world of the high-end donor. And, whoo boy it is not pretty. The first thing that jumps out is that a lot of the questions are really inane. 

 In fact, I almost feel sorry for Mitt Romney having to sit there and politely smile and nod as donors pick through their salad and tell him that what he really needs to do to win is "take the gloves off" or "show your face more on tv"—something he's been doing more or less non-stop. 

 The folks in the room all but advise Romney to simply tour around the country reading passages of Ayn Rand novels out loud at his campaign rallies and hectoring the idiotic masses to bow before their obvious superior. Romney, who is many things, but not a total fool, gently explains that that probably is not the best way to go about attempting to win over the Obama voters he needs to be elected. Almost none of the advice Romney gets during the tape is very good, some of it's terrible.

 That's not novel, of course, everyone who watches politics closely thinks they have the secret insight that will win the election. Unlike the millions of other political junkies and backseat drivers, this small coterie of folks, by sole virtue of their wealth, gets to impose their invaluable insights on the actual candidate. It would be like the head coach of the Giants, Tom Coughlin, having to spend most of the week between games meeting with the opinionated fans who call into sports talk radio with their theories about how the Giants should be blitzing on every down, or lining up two quarterbacks under center. 

 This is the power of money not just in politics, but in society more broadly: the power to make people listen to your ideas no matter how dumb or uninformed. The other thing that stood out to me was just how under siege, persecuted, and victimized these extremely wealthy people appear to feel. 

Up host Chris Hayes outlines the status of heavily contested U.S. House and Senate races across the country, and the polls that show a potential uptick for Democrats. Hayes and his panelists talk about possible explanations of what has changed in the 2012 cycle.

After a rough week on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney decided to release his 2011 tax returns, showing that he paid more in taxes than was legally necessary. John Nichols of The Nation magazine, syndicated radio host L. Joy Williams, The National Review editor Kevin Williamson, and The Guardian's Ana Marie Cox join Up w/ Chris Hayes to discuss why the Romney campaign opted for the move.

Saturday on Up w/ Chris, we'll be discussing what is looking more and more like Mitt Romney's worst week ever in his presidential campaign. The latest national poll shows him seven points behind President Obama. His comments on the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay income taxes have become infamous. And his 2011 tax returns show that he and his wife, Ann, purposely limited their charitable deductions in order to bring their effective tax rate up to 14.1 percent. Plus, we'll move from the national political scene into the down-ballot races and discuss the latest polls suggesting a dramatic turn to Democratic congressional candidates across the country.

Joining Chris at 8am ET Saturday on MSNBC are:

John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of Wisconsin's Capital Times.

L. Joy Williams, (@ljoywilliams) political strategist and founder LJW Political Stategies, co-host of radio show "This Week in Blackness."

Ana Marie Cox, (@anamariecox) columnist for The Guardian and founder of the political blog Wonkette.

Kevin Williamson, deputy managing editor of The National Review.

Charlies Pierce, contributing writer for Esquire, lead writer for the magazine's politics blog. 

Democratic congressional candidate for Iowa's 4th district Christie Vilsack, former teacher and First Lady of Iowa.

Correction: Kevin Williams no longer works for the Institute for Humane Studies.

:: Blogged by Katherine Guthrie (@kguth1130), production assistant for UP w/ Chris Hayes ::

Mitt Romney this week told ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he viewed middle income as $200,000 to $250,000 or less. The Up w/ Chris Hayes panelists talk about how if political focus is centered on the middle class, then what about the very poor?

Tanya Wells, founder of "Lives Behind the Numbers," a blog tracking poverty; Steve Gates, director for the non-profit "Chicago Youth Advocate Programs; and John Reel of "Seniors Service America," a non-profit for seniors; join to talk about poverty and how it is largely left out of the modern political conversation.

by Sam Seder Story of the Week, Up w/ Chris Hayes

At the Values Voters Summit on Friday, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan whose budget was approved by the House with sweeping cuts to aid for the poor responded to new figures from the Census Bureau this week showing that 46.2 million Americans were living below the poverty line last year—a rate basically unchanged from the year before—but a rate not seen in this country in nearly 20 years.

 Here's what Ryan had to say about Obama's record on poverty:

"The Obama economic agenda failed, not because it was stopped, but because it was passed. And here is what we got: Prolonged joblessness across the country. Twenty-three million Americans struggling to find work. Family income in decline. Fifteen percent of Americans living in poverty. Here we are, after four years of economic stewardship under these self-proclaimed advocates of the poor, and what do they have to show for it? More people in poverty, and less upward mobility wherever you look."

 It's not the first time this election cycle that we've seen the right raise the specter of the poor. But poverty is raised not to offer prescriptions or remedies but to be used as a cudgel, as a means of playing on middle class fears of losing ground by suggesting not so much that they, too, could become impoverished but that the threat to their economic stability is the poor themselves, who are taking that ground from them.  

 Calling President Obama the "food stamp President" is not bemoaning the plight of those Americans who, in the wake of a devastating financial crisis have lost the means to put food on the table for their families, but rather, to imply that some "other" is living large, while the rest of "us" struggle.  That said, we do know something about the people Romney relies on and what they believe about poverty.

Tomorrow we'll be taking a close look at poverty figures released this week by the Census Bureau, which show that nearly one in six Americans are living in poverty. We'll examine the poverty crisis through the lens of education by talking about the teachers' strike in Chicago. We'll also discuss representations of poverty in our culture and in our politics, and we'll highlight a stunning new report which shows that poverty has been essentially ignored by the media covering presidential campaign.

Sam Seder, host of The Majority Report, will be filling in for Chris Hayes. Joining Sam at 8am ET on MSNBC are:

Tanya Wells, (@vidawells) who, along with her husband, lost her job in 2008 and has gone back to school to try to get back on her feet. Tanya's family now survives in large part with the help of student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps.

Steven Gates, program director, Youth Advocacy Programs-Illinois and resident of the Roseland area of Chicago.

Melissa Boteach, director of the "Half in Ten" campaign at the Center for American Progress, a campaign to cut poverty by half in 10 years.

John Reel, assistant to the director at Senior Service America, Inc.

Gary Younge, (@garyyounge) Guardian columnist & feature writer, columnist for The Nation, Chicago resident and parent who has been covering the Chicago teachers strike for the Guardian.

Matt Farmer, (@mifarmer) Chicago lawyer and parent, member of his local school council at Philip Rogers Elementary School, contributor to the Huffington Post.

Stephen Pimpare, (@stephenpimpare) associate professor at Columbia University School of Social Work, author of "A People's History of Poverty in America."

Elise DeBroad, teacher at International Community High School in Bronx, NY.