early voting

Early vote counts say Ireland has become the first nation in the world to OK marriage equality by popular vote.

Mitt Romney is the target, abortion is the issue, and the $100,000 ad buy will change the tone of the Iowa and New Hampshire presidential primaries. This weekend marks the first negative TV advertising in the two early voting states as campaigns headed into the critical weeks before the first vote, with an independent group's claim that the former Massachusetts governor has flip-flopped -- a sometimes crippling charge in presidential politics. Analysts say similar negative ads are likely to air against Romney's chief GOP rival, Rudy Giuliani, whose positions on gun control and immigration are markedly different from those he espoused as New York City mayor.

Mitt Romney's presidential campaign has been embraced in a most unlikely place: at Bob Jones University, the influential Christian college that teaches that his Mormon Church is a cult. In early-voting South Carolina, Romney has picked up support among the evangelicals and social conservatives who are a political force. Last week Romney won the endorsements of Bob Jones III and Robert Taylor, the founder's grandson and a top dean, respectively, at Bob Jones University.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama battled to refocus his campaign on the five-year-old Iraq war and the slumping U.S. economy, ending a week that saw him clobbered over incendiary remarks by his longtime Chicago pastor. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, his rival for the Democratic nomination, blasted away on the war and economy as well, while pressing demands to reinstate delegates in Michigan and Florida. Clinton won both contests, but the national Democratic Party said they would not be counted because the state votes were held too early and violated party rules.

Writer Michael Joseph Gross joins a crew of 50 campaign volunteers from Boston (who traveled on a bus they dubbed "The Not-So-Straight-Talk Express") and about 100 Ohio volunteers to canvass for Obama throughout Columbus and finds that not all of the locals are receptive to Obama's promise of change.