Many of you look at the RealClearPolitics electoral map with some regularity, so you probably know it presently shows Romney trailing Obama in electoral votes by 191 to 221 with 126 electoral votes in swing states that are close enough not to call right now. You are to be congratulated for not paying too much attention to the horse-race polls, of which the RCP summary and average is here.
If you are doing all that, you might think you are on top of the election. If so, you would be wrong. The problem is that individual polls of the swing states are not done all that often, so averages of those results can be based on stale data. Of the 10 states listed as toss ups, 8 have not been polled since last week's Democrat convention and 5 have not been polled since the Republican convention.
The worst example is New Hampshire which hasn't been polled since the Ryan selection on August 12, after which Romney gained 2.7 percentage points in the horse race and pulled even going into the Republican convention. The RCP average for NH actually includes two polls in June!
More significant is that the full extent of that Romney-Ryan surge is captured by only two of the four polls in the Florida average, even though Florida is critical.
