Hurricane affects early presidential voting_美文

Hurricane affects early presidential voting

As commander in chief, Obama is expected to greatly reduce his campaign time and focus on disaster relief should the hurricane cause widespread damage. While an incumbent president can easily attract criticism from people hit by the hurricane, it could also be a time for Obama to demonstrate his strong leadership.

It is believed that Republican candidate Romney will not try to exploit the hurricane to attack Obama. He faced a backlash when he blamed Obama for the handling of the US consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya, soon after the incident.

Besides forcing candidates to change their campaign plans in the last few days leading up to the election, there are also concerns that the storm might impact the election in other ways, such as causing damage to polling stations, preventing voters from seeing campaign ads, reducing TV coverage of the election and discouraging undecided voters to travel to polling stations.

With most federal offices in Washington closed on Monday, thousands of flights to the East Coast were canceled, and all public schools in New York, Washington and Boston closed. Much of the public transit system was shut down.

No one seems to know what the real impact of Hurricane Sandy will be on the close presidential race. Opinion polls show the race to be essentially tied at the national level.