Presidential races

President Obama faces serious headwinds in his effort to retain the evenly split battleground state.

TOP STORY: 6 percent

Mitt Romney predicted unemployment would be 6 percent or lower by the end of his first term on Wednesday.

"I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we'd put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, and perhaps a little lower," Romney told Time magazine's Mark Halperin.

The number gives a concrete figure Romney can sell on the campaign trail — but if he’s elected and doesn't achieve 6 percent unemployment he's unlikely to hear the end of it. Just ask President Obama, who famously predicted the Stimulus Act would keep unemployment rate below 8 percent.

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The Arizona elections official who suggested last week he might remove President Obama from the state's ballot without confirmation that his birth certificate was legitimate said Wednesday he considers the issue closed.

"Late yesterday, our office received the 'verification in-lieu of certified copy' from officials within the Hawaii Department of Health that we requested in March. They have officially confirmed that the information in the copy of the Certificate of Live Birth for the President matches the original record in their files," Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett (R) said in a statement to NPR.

"As Arizona's chief elections officer, I have the responsibility to certify the ballot to the state's 15 counties. At the request of numerous constituents, I merely asked Hawaiian officials to verify the information contained within President Obama's original birth certificate. They have complied with the request and I consider the matter closed."

Romney, in an education speech, said the unions "don't fight for our children"; he also addressed his time at Bain

A conservative outside group in Colorado will greet President Obama's visit to the state with radio ads mocking him as a celebrity and a failure.

Compass Colorado has bought time on two Denver-area stations to air the ad.

Obama is set to travel to Colorado on Wednesday to give the commencement address at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and to attend a fundraiser in Denver.

Mitt Romney is consistently beating the president among voters who consider themselves independent.

President Obama took less than 60 percent of the vote in Democratic primaries in both states.

Samuel Wurzelbacher said Biden is perpetrating class warfare by suggesting that plumbers can't be president.

Vice President Biden worked to tie Mitt Romney to former President George W. Bush and the obsolete policies of a bygone era in a speech on Tuesday at a New Hampshire college.

“We will not do it their way again. We intend to move forward,” Biden said in Keene, N.H. “We intend to build a middle class. We mean it.”

Accusing Romney of championing a return to policies that “ran us into the ditch,” Biden pointed to GOP resistance to a bill renewing the Violence Against Women Act, opposition to a contraception-coverage mandate and what he called a “Republican-induced recession.”

“We will not go back to the '50s in social policy, to the Cold War in our foreign policy and to the policies of the last administration on our economic policy,” Biden said, almost shouting as he ripped into the presumptive GOP nominee.

Priorities USA, a super-PAC backing President Obama, is out with a new ad hitting Mitt Romney for his private-sector work, with one former employee saying Romney closed down her plant and "made me sick."

"I worked at the plant going on 34 years. I thought that I was going to retire from there," said Loris Huffman, who worked at the paper company AmPad, which was bought by Bain Capital during Romney's time running the company and declared bankruptcy a few years later. "I had about two and a half years to go. I was suddenly 60 years old, I had no healthcare, and that's scary. When Mitt Romney did that, he made me sick."