The swing states with the largest number of electoral college votes up for grabs are Florida (29), North Carolina (15), Ohio (18) and Virginia (13).
Polling of nine swing states shows Romney leading only in North Carolina and trailing by more than four percent in both Ohio and Virginia. Florida is closer with Obama credited with a razor-thin lead of around one percent.
“These are the dominoes that have to fall for each of the campaigns, and the trouble is, based on the polling at least, eight of the nine dominoes are at least slightly tilted in Obama’s direction,” said expert Charles Franklin.
“Romney needs to tilt some of them back in his direction and he needs to do that fairly soon,” said Franklin, a politics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-founder of Pollster.com.
The Romney campaign remains defiant and insists their man is still effectively tied with an incumbent who has a large Achilles heel: the economy.
“Given everything we’ve gone through, everybody wants to count this guy out,” Neil Newhouse, Romney’s campaign pollster, told the Washington Post. “And yet the poll numbers don’t do that. The poll numbers put him right in the middle of this.”
A week on Tuesday, Romney will face off against Obama in the first of three televised presidential debates that collectively represent his final big opportunity to turn things around.
On election day, November 6, there is always the question of which side has had the better “ground game,” getting voters to the polls and ensuring their candidate is not defeated by low turnout.
Franklin said he wasn’t ready to call the race for Obama.
“This is sort of like knowing a half-time score in an American football game. It tells you something about the outcome but it’s not the final score,” he told AFP.
“There’s still certainly time for events to occur that might shift some of those critical states,” he said.
“The economy is still out there, it could change in new economic reports, the debates are forthcoming, and finally we have the potential for international events to arise as well as what the candidates say on the campaign trail.”
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