The Obama campaign, in concert with the DNC, raised $43.6 million in April, the campaign announced through a video featuring campaign manager Jim Messina. That number is well below their March haul of $53 million. It’s also slightly less than the $45 million raised in February.

In the video, Messina boasts 169,500 first time donors last month, which Messina says puts the campaign close to 2 million donors this cycle. The average donation was $50.23 while 98% of donations were $250 or less.

Messina also stresses the massive spending against the president from Republican super PACs, an amount the video puts at close to $60 million having already been spent against him. In contrast to negative ads to outside groups, Messina describes the president’s strategy as positive, including their latest set of campaign ads touting the president’s record. Messina also goes into some details about the campaign’s ground game in swing states, putting field officers on the ground and registering voters.  

Watch:

Crossroads GPS, a nonprofit affiliated with Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, is launching a $25 million, month-long ad offensive against President Obama in 10 swing states, reports the AP. The president’s campaign is in the middle of a $25 million campaign in key battleground states as well. 

The first ad to kick off the campaign will be an $8 million TV buy for an ad that criticizes Obama on the economy. The ad uses the president’s own words from the 2008 campaign and contrasts them with what Republicans have been calling “broken promises.”

“We must help the millions of homeowners who are facing foreclosure,” Obama said in June 2008. The ad then says: “Promise broken. One in five mortgages are still under water.”

The ad will run in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia starting Thursday.

Overall, Crossroads GPS and it’s sister organization American Crossroads have raised close to $200 million this election cycle and plan to spend up to $300 million during the election, according to the AP. 

On both sides of the aisle, spending on advertising has skyrocketed as both sides rush to define themselves and the opposition before voters’ views of the candidates become set in stone. In addition to Obama’s current ad blitz, the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action launched a $4 million ad buy in key swing states, hitting Romney on his record at Bain Capital. On the Republican side, super PACs have already spent millions. 

Nebraska state Sen. Deb Fischer has won the Republican nomination for Senate, in the race to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson, in a major last-minute upset.

With 91 percent of precincts reporting, Fischer has 41 percent, state Attorney General Jon Bruning 36 percent, and former state Attorney General Stenberg 19 percent. The Associated Press has projected the race for Fischer, who will now face Democratic former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who is a decided underdog to return to his old seat in a state that has gone even further into the GOP column since he retired in 2000.

Bruning was the frontrunner throughout most of this primary race — but then proceeded to get caught up in a variety of attacks with Stenberg, which enabled Fischer to surge into first place during the final week of the campaign.

The polls have now closed in Nebraska, where there is a heated Republican primary for Senate.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chair of the Senate Judicary Committee, wants Attorney General Eric Holder to review the federal funds received by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in the wake of the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

“I urge the Department to take all appropriate steps to determine whether taxpayer dollars provided through the SCAAP program have been used in connection with the detention of individuals whose civil rights have been violated,” Leahy wrote.  “If so, I urge you to consider possible remedies including whether that funding can be recovered.”

Like all federal grantees, Maricopa County – which has received $25 million since 2000 through the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program – “must be held to high standards of ethical and lawful conduct when applying for and using such public funding,” Leahy wrote.

The Department of Homeland Security cut off Arpaio’s access to their Secure Communities program after DOJ’s initial report on civil rights abuses in Maricopa County back in December.

Per the Wall Street Journal:

Greek depositors withdrew €700 million ($898 million) from local banks Monday, the country’s president said, as he warned that the situation facing Greece’s lenders was very difficult.

The White House on Tuesday issued a veto threat to the House Republican version of the Violence Against Women Act.

“The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 4970, a bill that would undermine the core principles of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA),” reads a statement from the Office of Management and Budget. OMB griped about provisions that, unlike the Senate-passed version, exclude protections for Native Americans and LGBT domestic violence and undocumented immigrants.

More from the OMB statement:

H.R. 4970 also takes direct aim at immigrant victims of domestic violence and sexual assault by removing critical protections currently in law.  H.R. 4970 allows abusers to be notified when a victim files a VAWA self-petition for relief, and it eliminates the path to citizenship for U visa holders – victims of serious crimes such as torture, rape, and domestic violence – who are cooperating with law enforcement in the investigation or prosecution of these crimes.  These proposals senselessly remove existing legal protections, undermine VAWA’s core purpose of protecting victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, frustrate important law enforcement objectives, and jeopardize victims by placing them directly in harm’s way.

The Administration urges the House to find common ground with the bipartisan Senate-passed bill and consider and pass legislation that will protect all victims.  H.R. 4970 rolls back existing law and removes long-standing protections for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault – crimes that predominately affect women.  If the President is presented with H.R. 4970, his senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill.

Obama campaign press secretary Ben La Bolt probably wasn’t expecting a rumble with CNN host Ashleigh Banfield today, but he sure got one.

Banfield criticized the Obama campaign over their new anti-Bain video, an investment company previously headed by Mitt Romney.

“Come on, you’re mincing dates and you’re cheating here,” Banfield prodded. “Is it fair and is it clean?”

“Keep it clean out there for heavens sake, we have that crap on our television,” Banfield advised. “Be nice to each other, pump your own guy up, it’s nicer for us Americans.”

On Tuesday, the White House released financial diclosure forms showing the president and his wife are worth between $2.6 million and $8.3 million. 

From the AP:

The Obamas have a 30-year mortgage on their Chicago home worth between $500,000 and $1 million with an interest rate of 5.625 percent.

Royalties from Obama’s books, “Dreams From My Father,” ‘’The Audacity of Hope” and “Of Thee I Sing,” totaled between $250,000 and $2.1 million.

Likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney has said his net worth is around $200 million.

A Republican state representative in Wisconsin has confirmed to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he drafted “right-to-work” legislation, but did not introduce it in the previous session.

“It’s very evident that we did not have the votes to pass it,” said state Rep. Chris Kapenga, according to the Journal Sentinel. Kapenga also said he did not believe the votes would be there to pass it next year, either.

The revelation comes on the heels of newly unearthed video of Gov. Scott Walker telling a wealthy right-to-work supporter in January 2011 that he would pursue a “divide and conquer” strategy against organized labor, starting with public employee unions. Democrats have pounced on the video as a weapon in the ongoing recall campaign.

Kapenga’s support for right-to-work legislation was first reported by the liberal Wisconsin site Blogging Blue. According to attendees at a town hall meeting in Waukesha County, Kapenga was asked by an attendee who favors the legislation why it was not being introduced. Kapenga reportedly replied: “If we had done it earlier, when we wanted, then [state Supreme Court Justice] Prosser would not have been elected. Right now is not the right time. We have to wait until it is politically feasible.”

Elizabeth Warren is still on the defensive over questions for once listing herself as a minority (Native American) law teacher. Warren maintains that she was not aware the school was describing her in that way and says she did not use her ethnicity to her advantage. But a report from Politico details a 1997 Fordham Law Review issue describing the Massaschusetts Senate candidate as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color”:

The mention was in the middle of a lengthy and heavily-annotated Fordham piece on diversity and affirmative action and women. The title of the piece, by Laura Padilla, was “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue.”

“There are few women of color who hold important positions in the academy, Fortune 500 companies, or other prominent fields or industries,” the piece says. “This is not inconsequential. Diversifying these arenas, in part by adding qualified women of color to their ranks, remains important for many reaons. For one, there are scant women of color as role models. In my three years at Stanford Law School, there were no professors who were women of color. Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.”

Retiring Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) said Tuesday that she supports Mitt Romney for president.

“I haven’t said anything formally but I am going to support Mitt Romney,” she told TPM in the Capitol.

The Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit denied to stay on Monday to a group appealing a lower court ruling which found that the Federal Election Commission should close a loophole allowing non-profit “social welfare” groups running campaign commercials to keep the names of their donors secret.

Rep. Chris van Hollen, the plaintiff in the case, had argued that the FEC is willfully misinterpreting the disclosure requirements McCain-Feingold by issuing a 2007 rule which allowed donors to remain secret as long as donations technically weren’t for specific advertisements. The law said that “all contributors” to nonprofit groups should be disclosed.

On a two to one vote, the D.C. Court of Appeals turned down a request to stay the lower court’s ruling.

“This is a very important victory in the battle to end secret contributions being funneled into federal elections,” Democracy 21 President Fred Wertheimer, one of the lawyers involved in the case, said in a statement. “This case represents the first major breakthrough in the effort to restore for the public the disclosure of contributors who are secretly providing massive amounts to influence federal elections.”

Law professor Rick Hasen writes that 501c4 groups could create “new separate funds to run these ads, so that the groups need disclose the names of only those donors funding these ads (rather than all of their donors).” Hasen says he believes the case will ultimately end up in the Supreme Court, “where the outcome may be different.”

Crossroads GPS, the super PAC arm of Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, is planning a large ad campaign in most swing states beginning later this week.

Per a tweet from Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod: 

FYI: Mitt’s pals over at Crossroads GPS, the non-disclosing half of the Rove operation, is laying down a TV buy to begin later this week.

— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) May 15, 2012

Politico has more details:

The GOP outside spending juggernaut American Crossroads is buying airtime in virtually every major presidential swing state for ads starting later this week, a GOP media-tracking source tells me.

The flights cover Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida, as well as markets in Maine, Vermont and Nebraska. Those last three states are not competitive on the presidential level but contain markets that overlap with swing states New Hampshire and Iowa.

The Crossroads ads are a combination of 30- and 60-second spots and will run May 17 to May 23, the source said.

What’s unknown is whether the ads will focus solely on the presidential race or Senate races as well.

Democrats have much higher confidence that their nominee will win the presidential race this fall than Republicans do, a new survey of adults from Gallup finds:

Fifty-six percent of Americans think Barack Obama will win the 2012 presidential election, compared with 36% who think Mitt Romney will win. Democrats are more likely to believe that Obama will win than Republicans are to believe Romney will. Independents are nearly twice as likely to think that Obama, rather than Romney, will prevail.

The prediction survey has had mixed results when it came to final election results in the past, though Gallup says the surveys have been “generally accurate”:

• In three separate measurements in 2004, Americans thought Bush would be the winner in two and were split in their predictions in the other, conducted immediately after the Democratic convention. In the final prediction, from mid-October, 56% thought Bush would win and 36% thought Kerry would.
• The accuracy of the 2000 election prediction is harder to evaluate, given that Al Gore won the popular vote and George W. Bush the electoral vote. In four out of five measurements that year, Americans thought Bush would win, though in the final measurement, taken in mid-September, Americans gave Gore the edge.
• In an August 1996 poll, Americans overwhelmingly believed incumbent Bill Clinton (69%) would defeat Bob Dole (24%).

Read the numbers here.

ABC News reports:

On the day he might well have been sworn in as the new president of France, former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn instead filed a million-dollar countersuit against the New York City hotel maid whose accusation of attempted rape one year ago cost him his job and derailed his political aspirations.

In court papers filed in the Bronx, Strauss-Kahn said he suffered “grievous harm” to his personal and professional reputation, “emotional distress” and financial hardship because of what he called Nafissatou Diallo’s “malicious and wanton false accusation.” The defamation claim asks for $1 million in damages.

Former President Bill Clinton said he finds Indiana Senate nominee Richard Mourdock’s opposition to compromise “disturbing,” reports ABC News.

Clinton railed against Mourdock’s aversion to compromise said at a fiscal summit in Washington Tuesday. “But he said, ‘I am totally against any compromise, our worldviews are irreconcilable, and we just have to keep fighting till somebody wins it all,’” Clinton said of Mourdock, who ousted longtime Republican Sen. Dick Lugar in last week’s Indiana Senate primary.

“And if that were the view, there would have never been a Constitution, there never would have been a Bill of Rights, the Capitol would never have been moved to Washington, D.C., the federal government would not have assumed the debts of the colonies from the Revolutionary War, and nothing else would have happened,” Clinton said.

Mourdock, Clinton hedged, is “a very appealing sort of person” and whom he “likes him personally.”

President Obama will meet with House Speaker John Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the White House tomorrow, Jay Carney announced during Tuesday’s briefing.

Newly sworn in French President Francois Hollande’s plane was hit by lightning en route to Germany. Hollande’s plane was forced to turn back to Paris, so the president could get on another plane back to Berlin, the BBC reports.

President Obama addressed his recent support for same-sex marriage and Vice President Joe Biden’s endorsement of it earlier on Meet the Press. Watch the president’s appearance below:

In a statement to TPM, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), a member of the Democratic leadership, reacted to House Speaker John Boehner’s demand that the next debt limit increase be paired with dollar-for-dollar “cuts and reforms.”

“Republicans have spent the last year running away from the deal we made to avoid the last artificial crisis they created, so I don’t know why the Speaker is already laying the groundwork for another one,” Murray told TPM. “Apparently one Tea Party credit downgrade isn’t enough for House Republicans.”

In a statement to reporters, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) hit House Speaker John Boehner for demanding another debt limit showdown…after he violated the terms of last year’s deal.

“It is pretty galling for Speaker Boehner to be laying down demands for another debt ceiling agreement when he won’t even abide by the last one,” Schumer said. “The last thing the country needs is a rerun of last summer’s debacle that nearly brought down our economy.”

George W. Bush has endorsed Mitt Romney, per ABC News:

“I’m for Mitt Romney,” Bush told ABC News this morning as the doors of an elevator closed on him, after he gave a speech on human rights a block from his old home — the White House.

Public Poling Polling (D) has a new snap poll of the Nebraska Senate primary, conducted Monday night on the eve of the election, showing state Sen. Deb Fischer potentially on the verge of winning a huge upset over the former frontrunner for the Republican nomination, state Attorney General Jon Bruning.

The numbers: Fischer 37 percent, Bruning 33 percent, and former state Attorney General Don Stenberg 17 percent. The survey of likely voters was conducted on Monday with a small sample of just 272 respondents, and a margin of error of 5.9 percent.

Bruning was the frontrunner throughout most of this primary race — but then proceeded to get caught up in attacks with Stenberg, including ethical allegations against Bruning. Combined with a last-minute wave of third-party advertising against Bruning and for Fischer by businessman Joe Ricketts, the owner of the Chicago Cubs, the previously third-place Fischer has shot up in the polls.

The polls will close Tuesday night, at 9 p.m. ET.

The Ohio GOP has named Matt Borges, a veteran of Ohio politics and a former lobbyist, as its new executive director. Borges was director of Gov. John Kasich’s Inaugural Committee. Before that, he led the 2010 campaign of Ohio Auditor Dave Yost.

Borges was also involved in a pay-to-play scandal in 2004 but had it expunged from his record in 2009. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has the details on Borges past as well as the reason for the shake-up:

The shakeup at the Ohio GOP stems from a bitter campaign to oust former party Chairman Kevin DeWine, who resigned last month after allies of Republican Gov. John Kasich worked for weeks to rally support for a new chairman.

…

For Borges, the new job marks another step forward since he was embroiled in a pay-to-play scandal in 2004. He pleaded guilty in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of a public office for giving preferential treatment to certain brokers who contributed to Republican Ohio Treasurer Joe Deters’ re-election campaign. He paid a $1,000 fine. He later cleared his misdemeanor record when he was granted an expungement.

President Obama on The View said he’s not much of a “tweeter.” “As Michelle said, I’m too long-winded for 140 characters,” he added.

President Obama got personal on The View on Tuesday, saying First Lady Michelle Obama gets “jealous” when he sings too much. He also talked about how she pokes fun at him, with big-ear and big-nose jokes.

The Justice Department has opened in inquiry into JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion trading loss, the Wall Street Journal reports, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Elizabeth Warren has a new radio ad in the Massachusetts Senate race, seeking to leverage the recent scandal at JPMorgan Chase toward the issue of financial reform. Warren has already called for CEO Jamie Dimon to resign from the New York Federal Reserve, and is seizing on the bank’s trading loss to return to her comfort zone of financial reform in the new campaign spot.

“Did you see the headline? One of America’s biggest banks lost $2 billion in just a few weeks,” Warren says. “Even now, Wall Street banks that got bailed out are still at it, gambling recklessly.”

“This is Elizabeth Warren. I stood up to big banks. I took on their army of lobbyists and help win the fight for a consumer protection agency. But there’s still more to do. Wall Street isn’t going to change its ways until Washington gets serious about strong oversight and real accountability – no special deals. We need a tough cop on the beat to make sure that nobody steals your purse on Main Street — or your pension on Wall Street.

The problem is: in Washington, money talks — and Wall Street has plenty of money to spread around. So Wall Street gets all the special breaks, while working families get hammered. That’s what I want to change. I’m Elizabeth Warren, candidate for U.S. Senate, and I approve this message.”

President Obama weighed in on his reelection chances on The View just now: “When your name is Barack Obama, it’s always close,” he said.