Mitt Romney Could Benefit From GOP Engagement, Pew Research Poll Says

Who's really ahead, Mitt Romney or Barack Obama?

WASHINGTON -- Political junkies have been scratching their heads again this week as another batch of national surveys produced results ranging from a 13-percentage point lead for President Barack Obama to a 5-point advantage for his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

When rolled together into the HuffPost Pollster chart, the collective result from all the polls remains roughly where it has been for the past month and for much of the period before the contentious Republican primaries: Obama holds a narrow net advantage in the national polls, just under 1 percentage point.

Poll watchers are busily speculating about the cause of all the variation. But for those who care about where the race is headed, the most important results of the week might be those from an in-depth survey from the Pew Research Center, which measured voter interest and engagement in the presidential election.

Mitt Romney Financial Disclosure Form Lists Bain Capital, Goldman Sachs Gains

WASHINGTON -- Mitt Romney released his personal financial disclosure form for 2011 late on Friday, publicly revealing a host of transactions involving Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs for the first time.

Romney's 2010 tax return had pegged the presumptive Republican nominee's net worth at somewhere between $190 million and $250 million, but the newly released disclosures shine more light on where and how Romney makes his fortune.

According to the disclosure form, Romney's most lucrative assets in 2011 were his investments in Bain Capital. Nineteen different Bain investments are worth a total of at least $4.5 million, but are likely far more valuable because two of those assets are simply described as worth more than $1 million. Federal disclosure rules do not require candidates to list the precise value of assets or earnings, instead relying on broad ranges of wealth.

One can thus calculate a range for how much Romney earned from Bain and other holdings in 2011. Over the course of last year, the former Bain Capital CEO took in somewhere between $720,000 and $6.26 million from holdings in the firm. Money managed by Goldman Sachs was good for at least $1,113,503.01, with the gain on one Goldman fund classified simply as "over $1,000,000." In addition, he received between $100,001 and $1,000,000 from the sale of an asset portfolio managed by Goldman Sachs.

Romney also earned $260,389.74 in 2011 from stock awards he received for serving on the board of Marriott Hotels in 2009 and 2010 (Romney's first name, Willard, was inspired by Marriott founder J. Willard Marriott, a close friend of the former Massachusetts governor's father). Royalties from his book, "No Apology: Believe in America," were good for between $50,001 and $100,000. On Sept. 12, 2011, he received between $201 and $1,000 from The New York Times for an op-ed he wrote.

Romney received between $571,666 and $1,768,500 from the sale of various stocks during the year.

Speaking fees were another big income source, with four talks bringing in a total of $189,975, including a $68,000 speech at GoldenTree Asset Management, a $42,500 talk at Barclays Bank, and another $68,000 speech before the International Franchise Association.

Romney owns between $250,001 and $500,000 in gold. He made less than $201 from those holdings last year.

The median household income in the United States at the close of 2011 was$51,413.

View Romney's financial disclosure form in its entirety here.

Donald Trump Can't Be Controlled, Causes Major Headache For Mitt Romney

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney shakes hands with Donald Trump at a press conference where Trump endorsed Romney, on Feb. 2 in Las Vegas.

LAS VEGAS -- "He doesn't want to talk about it."

Or so said Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's spokesman, on the question of where President Obama was born.

Cohen, in a phone interview, called the renewed controversy over Trump's questioning of whether Obama was born in the U.S. "a distraction," and blamed it on "the liberal media."

But five minutes after The Huffington Post talked to Cohen on the phone, a call to Trump's New York offices resulted in the casino, real-estate and reality-TV mogul being patched through on the line, from here in Las Vegas.

Adding to the surreal nature of the day, Trump openly disagreed with his own spokesman's assessment.

"I don't imagine this is distraction at all," Trump said. "In fact, we have a fundraiser that's going to take place in a couple of hours, and I'm just walking through the lobby of Trump international and this place is packed."

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem for Mitt Romney.

Romney is set to mathematically clinch the Republican nomination on Tuesday evening when polls close in Texas and he is expected to finally cross the line of winning the required 1,144 delegates. But it was Trump's theatrics ahead of an evening fundraiser with Romney in Las Vegas that stepped all over the day's triumphs for the presumptive GOP candidate.

Trump went on CNBC in the morning to double down on his comments last week, when he seized on a report earlier this month from a conservative website, Breitbart.com, that uncovered a "promotional booklet" from 1991 in which Obama's "then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel … touts Obama as 'born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.'"

Even the Breitbart site said at the time that they considered the booklet an act of biography embellishment by Obama, and that they have always believed that Obama was born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961, as his long-form birth certificate states.

But Trump told HuffPost Tuesday that he disagreed with Breitbart's assessment, and talked for almost 10 minutes about why the Obama campaign -- which released a web video and a statement condemning Romney for not disavowing Trump's comments -- actually wants the birther issue to go away.