President Barack Obama rallied supporters in Davenport this morning, and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney is scheduled to campaign in Cedar Rapids tonight. After the jump I’ve enclosed highlights from Obama’s event and other links about the presidential campaign in Iowa. I will update this post later with highlights from the Romney rally.

Bleeding Heartland is updating absentee ballot totals statewide and in the four Congressional districts here every weekday. As of October 23, more than 540,000 Iowans had requested absentee ballots. With today’s early voting included, the statewide ballot requests will surpass the total Iowa early vote in 2008.  

About 3,500 people came to the Mississippi Valley Fairground this morning to hear the president tout his plan for the country and slam his opponent’s “Romnesia.” O. Kay Henderson posted quotes from his speech and the full audio link here.

“We’ve come up with a name for this condition. It’s called Romnesia,” Obama said. “Romnesia – I want to go over the symptoms with you, Davenport, because I don’t want you to catch it. I don’t want it to spread. If you say you won’t give a big tax cut to the wealthy, but you’re caught on video saying your tax cut would include the top one percent, then you might have Romnesia.”

Obama offered a litany of “symptoms”, including Romney’s remarks about having Detroit auto companies go through bankruptcy and Romney’s arguments against hiring more teachers.

“We joke about Romnesia, but all of this speaks to something that’s really important and that is the issue of trust,” Obama said. “There’s no more serious issue on a presidential campaign than trust. Trust matters.”

The president added that “Obamacare” covers pre-existing conditions.

Henderson noted that today’s event was Obama’s tenth in Iowa this year. Vice President Joe Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama have also visited the state several times in recent months.

Iowa’s six electoral votes could be crucial if Romney wins both Florida and Ohio. Then Obama’s path to 270 electoral votes would go through Nevada, Wisconsin, Iowa, plus either Virginia or both New Hampshire and Colorado. Of the many electoral vote counters online, I think NPR’s is among the most user-friendly.

Yesterday Obama held a conference call with Des Moines Register Publisher Laura Hollingsworth and Editor Rick Green. The president asked that the interview be off the record, but his campaign released the full transcript today, after Green wrote on the Register’s blog that voters should be able to hear the comments.

[A]fter our call, I did send a note to the communications chief of the president’s Iowa campaign. I asked that it be shared with others who decided to shortchange readers and voters everywhere from hearing the president’s very thoughtful and specific responses to our questions focused on rebuilding the national economy, imploding the gridlock that has gripped Washington, his priorities for a second term and the importance Iowa plays in winning a second term on Nov. 6. […]

“What the President shared with us this morning – and the manner, depth and quality of his presentation – would have been well-received by not only his base, but also undecideds. From a voter standpoint, keeping it off-the-record was a disservice.”

Reading the interview, I wondered why Obama had wanted to keep the call off the record. It’s mostly the same talking points he has used many times in other interviews and his stump speech. This was the most interesting part:

So when you combine the Bush tax cuts expiring, the sequester in place, the commitment of both myself and my opponent — at least Governor Romney claims that he wants to reduce the deficit — but we’re going to be in a position where I believe in the first six months we are going to solve that big piece of business.

It will probably be messy. It won’t be pleasant. But I am absolutely confident that we can get what is the equivalent of the grand bargain that essentially I’ve been offering to the Republicans for a very long time, which is $2.50 worth of cuts for every dollar in spending, and work to reduce the costs of our health care programs.

And we can easily meet — “easily” is the wrong word — we can credibly meet the target that the Bowles-Simpson Commission established of $4 trillion in deficit reduction, and even more in the out-years, and we can stabilize our deficit-to-GDP ratio in a way that is really going to be a good foundation for long-term growth. Now, once we get that done, that takes a huge piece of business off the table.

The second thing I’m confident we’ll get done next year is immigration reform. And since this is off the record, I will just be very blunt. Should I win a second term, a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community. And this is a relatively new phenomenon. George Bush and Karl Rove were smart enough to understand the changing nature of America. And so I am fairly confident that they’re going to have a deep interest in getting that done. And I want to get it done because it’s the right thing to do and I’ve cared about this ever since I ran back in 2008.

On the America’s Voice blog, Pili Tobar linked to some wishful thinking by a Romney campaign surrogate:

In an interview with Spanish news agency EFE yesterday, Otto Reich, a Mitt Romney campaign surrogate for Latin America, attributed Romney’s low level of support among Latino voters to his belief that Latino voters “are not well informed.” Reich further lamented that “We’re not communicating (with those voters) as we should” – as if the Romney campaign’s low polling among Latinos should be blamed on messaging breakdowns rather than policy positions […].

The proof is in the polling – President Obama has a massive lead of 71%-20% over Romney in the latest impreMedia/Latino Decisions weekly tracking poll, which also found that Latino voter enthusiasm may be higher than conventional wisdom suggests.  Latino Decisions also recently released state-level Latino polling in the battleground states of Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia.  The state polling documents not only that President Obama is up big in head-to-head matchups  vs. Romney, but also that immigration is a major reason behind the historic gap.

Any comments about the presidential race are welcome in this thread.

THURSDAY UPDATE: Romney struck a confident tone in his speech to more than 3,000 people in Cedar Rapids.

“You may have noticed that over the last few weeks we’ve had some debates. Did you notice that?” Romney asked and the crowd cheered. “And the good news is those debates have propelled our campaign forward in a major way.”

Romney accused President Obama of running a “smaller and smaller” campaign the closer we get to Election Day.

“As he focuses on, well, trying to save certain characters on Sesame Street and playing silly word games and making attacks that he knows aren’t true, because frankly attacking me is not an agenda for the future,” Romney said, and the crowd cheered. […]

“They have been unable to lay out an agenda for what they’re going to do to help America,” Romney said. “They have been unable to defend and describe what they are going to do to get our economy going again and that’s why with a president that’s out of ideas and out of excuses, why on November 6th you’ve got to make sure you put him out of office.”

Romney had a simple request for his supporters:

“We will rise to the challenge. We will take back America,” Romney pledged during an 18-minute pep talk to a high-energy audience that filled a Landmark Aviation hangar at The Eastern Iowa Airport.

Flanked by his “Believe in America” campaign jet, Romney told the crowd he’ll keep his commitment as long as they “find someone who voted for Barack Obama last time and make sure they vote for me this time.”

Romney has scheduled appearances in Ames on Friday and in Davenport on October 29. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is schedule to campaign for Romney in Ankeny today (October 25).

Romney’s campaign won’t commit to any television network interviews between now and the election. Earlier this month, the Republican nominee backed out of a planned joint appearance with his wife on “The View”; instead, Ann Romney was a guest on that show without her husband.

Meanwhile, Democrats spent much of yesterday trying to tie Romney to Richard Mourdock, the Indiana GOP nominee for U.S. Senate who recently spoke out against abortion rights even in cases of rape. Romney previously cut a television commercial supporting Mourdock, who narrowly leads Democrat Joe Donnelly in most polling. Romney’s campaign said the presidential nominee disagreed with Mourdock’s assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape reflect God’s will, but he has not rescinded his endorsement of the Indiana Republican.

During an appearance on Jay Leno’s Tonight show last night, Obama had this to say on the matter.

Asked by host Jay Leno about Mourdock’s comments, in which the Indiana state treasurer said during a debate Tuesday evening that “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something God intended to happen,” the president said “rape is rape.”

“I don’t know how these, come up with these ideas … rape is rape. It is a crime,” the president said. “These various distinctions about rape … don’t make any sense to me.” […]

Obama also joked with Leno about an offer Wednesday from Donald Trump to donate $5 million to a charity of the president’s choice in exchange for his college and passport records. The president, referencing Trump’s accusations that he had not been born in the United States, joked that he and the reality show mogul had a longstanding beef dating back to when they grew up together in Kenya.

“We had constant run-ins on the soccer field,” Obama said. “He wasn’t very good and resented it. When we finally moved to America I thought it would be over.”

I thought The Onion had the best take on Trump’s publicity stunt and Mourdock’s comments.

Retired General Colin Powell, a former secretary of state under President George W. Bush, appeared on CBS This Morning October 25 to affirm he still supports Obama for president. Powell called Romney’s stands on foreign policy “a moving target” and described himself as a moderate Republican, a “dying breed.”