Obama: If election held today, 'we'd win'

NEW YORK, July 30 (UPI) -- U.S. President Barack Obama told a campaign rally in New York Monday "if the election were held today, I think it would be close but I think we'd win."

As he routinely does on the campaign trail, the president acknowledged "the economy is still rough enough for enough people that this is going to be a close election."

"I'm confident that we are running a good campaign and will continue to run a good campaign," he said. "But we are being outspent substantially by the other side, and the super PACs are engaging in an experience we have not seen in America democracy for quite some time. They are spending like nobody's business, mostly on negative ads. And we're going to have to continue to compete. We don't anticipate that we're going to match them dollar for dollar -- we don't need to. But we are going to have to make sure that we can get our message out effectively."

Obama told the crowd that because they are in New York, which is not a battleground state in the presidential election, "you're not completely subjected to" the kind of negative advertising that voters in some other states are seeing. However, he said "when people start saying how terrible it is I just have to remind them that take a look at what (Thomas) Jefferson and (John) Adams had to say about each other, and democracy has always been pretty rough and pretty messy."

"There is going to be, though, as the summer winds down and we get into the fall, the need for voters in these swing states to know not just what they're voting against but also what they're voting for," the president said. "And so we'll be spending a lot of time talking about the specific agenda that I intend to pursue in the second term -- which I think will make sure that this economy is going full guns.

"So (the) upshot is if the election were held today, I think it would be close but I think we'd win," he said. "And we now have 99 days left. If I can say that every single day for the next 99 days, then we will be able to embark on the next phase of this journey."