Many pundits have weighed in on the width of Romney's path to victory in the electoral college since the Republican became the presumptive nominee.
This piece by Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post's conservative blogger, is the first I saw on the subject. While not very substantive, it makes clear that there are enough electoral votes in swing states that Republicans often win to push Mitt Romney over the top.
Here is RCP's Sean Trende, a more authoritative electoral analyst, responding to Washington Post analysts Chris Cilliza and Dan Balz, and LA Times analyst Ron Brownstein, who all claim that Romney's path to victory is almost impossibly narrow. Trende says, yes, it's narrow if you are looking at it through the left's rosy lens of the Obama 2008 53%-46% popular vote victory. When looked at through the clear lens of today's national polls of registered voters adjusted with the likely voter shift of 2-6% toward the Republicans -- yes 6% is possible, read Trende and follow the link -- Romney's path opens to a boulevard of broken dreams for Progressivists.
There's also the trend in the RCP average on the national horse race question here. Draw your own lines on the graph part way down the page to see that Romney has been chipping away at Obama's 5 point lead of February 15, so that today it's down to 2 points.
Furthermore, pollster Dick Morris's recent analysis of presidential elections over the last half century shows a strong tendency for an incumbent candidate -- including would-be VP inheritors -- to lose a solid majority of the votes of the up-to-the-last-minute undecided.
Then there's the substantial decline in registration of Blacks and Hispanics since 2008. Of course, that's subject to change when ACORN hits the streets with its registration drives this summer. Er,... what's that you say? No ACORN?!
And finally, there's yesterday's release of the Gallup bimonthly Swing State poll (click the gray tabs at right) the first since the fog and foorah of the Republican primary died down, showing Obama up only 47%-45% in Gallup's 12 swing states. And most of that could be the non-swing state Pennsylvania....
Don't worry too much about the RCP Electoral Vote count map at this point. Most of the individual state polls date back to the primaries when everybody in the Republican party hated everyone else. As we move forward, there will be more frequent state polling, and we can start to pay more attention there.
So, I say to thee, thine efforts will be urgently required.
Hence, be ye not of heavy heart! But, bend to with a will!
