Nightly News   |  October 06, 2012

Romney igniting GOP base

NBC's Andrea Mitchell discusses the recent surge among Romney supporters and talks about the importance of the upcoming vice presidential debate.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>> bring in andrea mitchell now and she joins us from washington. andrea, governor romney had been held considered lukewarm in terms of the republican base early on in this. has that changed now?

>> it has, indeed, lester. the romney campaign is trying to use the momentum from his debate performance to fire up that base and it seems to be working as well as motivating his grassroots organization. that effort was slightly blunted by the jobs numbers, one of his talking point, but the campaign is clearly feeling a lot of energy. the biggest change is they have a coherent message, one message. why would the next four years be any different than the current four years? the problem for team obama, the president didn't make that case for himself when he had 70 million people at the debate and now they'll take down mitt romney with fact-checking and challenging what he said in the debate in advertisements and speeches, but they will not have that same, large audience.

>> peter noted that later in the week, the vice presidential debate will take place. could that be a potential game changer given the uneven debate we just saw this past week?

>> normally the vice presidential debates are not that key, but now all eyes will be on joe biden to show that he can do a better job than his boss, if you will, president obama against paul ryan and this will be a tough debate. i've been told david axelrod had been planning to take charge of the debate camp , and now he is in charge with the vice president's team.

>> andrea mitchell , thank you.