Republicans had hoped Romney would be in a better position by now. | REUTERS Mitt needs poll vault to win

Mitt Romney faces an increasingly daunting path to victory in the 2012 presidential race, as a wave of national and state-level polling suggests that President Barack Obama has cemented a small but meaningful lead across the battleground states.

Individual polls show varying snapshots of the Obama-Romney race: NBC News and the Wall Street Journal gave Obama a 5-point national lead in a survey published Tuesday night, while an AP-GfK poll released Wednesday morning pegged the president’s lead at just 1 point. Gallup’s tracking poll, meanwhile, showed Obama’s post-convention polling bounce fading to a 1-point lead.


The rosiest picture of the race for Obama came this afternoon from the Pew Research Center, which found Obama drawing 51 percent of the vote to Romney’s 43 percent, leading on nearly every issue question and fighting his challenger to a draw on who would better handle the economy.

From the fog of survey data available on the 2012 race, some consistent, post-convention trends have clearly begun to emerge. In the most credible national polls, Obama rarely leads Romney by more than a few points. But the president is almost invariably in the lead.

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These polls were taken after the parties’ conventions, but mostly before the release this week of a controversial video of Romney this week in which he says that 47 percent of people don’t pay income taxes and are dependent on the government for services. Some data was collected before the attacks on U.S. diplomatic outposts in North Africa; some was collected afterward.

More problematic for Romney is the state-level data that gives Obama a slight edge in more than enough states to block his challenger from amassing 270 electoral college votes. Because of the makeup of the electoral map, Romney has to win nearly all the swing states on the table, while Obama only has to win a handful.

Of the biggest prizes up for grabs — Ohio, Virginia, Florida and North Carolina — Obama is the favorite in two, according to public surveys. NBC/Wall Street Journal polling and the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling gave Obama an edge in Ohio in the mid-to-high single digits. In Virginia, one survey from the Washington Post and another from Quinnipiac University, CBS News and the New York Times placed Obama at or above the 50 percent mark.

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There has been little public polling in Florida — without which it becomes much harder for Romney to win — and strategists on both sides say the race there remains close. Only in North Carolina is Romney believed to have a slim edge.

In the bigger picture, it would take a national shift of several percentage points or the flipping of more than a few major swing states to put Romney back in the lead, and the momentum — with less than two months to go, doesn’t seem to be moving in the challenger’s direction.

Even if Romney were to win Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, Colorado and New Hampshire — all states Obama won in 2008 — the Republican would still be three electoral votes short of victory.

And right now, Romney is not leading in many of those states, leaving him well short of the threshold he needs to clear and under urgent pressure to reshuffle the race’s dynamics.

“The bottom line is, you’d rather be in Obama’s shoes than Romney’s. He has a lead in the battleground states and he probably has to carry fewer of them,” said Marist College pollster Lee Miringoff, who conducts swing-state polls for NBC and the Wall Street Journal.

The problem for Romney, Miringoff said, is that Romney has to be “drawing an inside straight” in the state-by-state numbers in order to cross the 270-vote threshold.

“If you take Florida away from Romney, then it becomes paramount for him to do lots of other states. You take Ohio away, it’s not quite as dramatic but it still leads to the same conclusion,” Miringoff said. “Having said that, there’s also the possibility that the national numbers shift two or three points. The battleground states, although they’re obviously all separate, could react similarly.”

Purple Strategies pollster Doug Usher emphasized the severity of Romney’s electoral college challenge, agreeing that the loss of any one mega-state, like Florida, would deepen Romney’s problems by an order of magnitude everywhere else.

“Florida is a must-win for Romney by any measure. If he doesn’t win Florida, he has to win Ohio and Pennsylvania and Colorado and a bunch of other states that he’s not going to win in combination, and certainly not going to win in an electorate where Florida goes for Obama,” Usher said.

Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, said his organization’s data illustrated “the seriousness of the problem for Romney right now, not only in the margin but in all of the internals.”

”Even on an issue like the deficit, where Romney had an advantage earlier in the year, that advantage is now a virtual tie on who would best handle that situation, as well as the job situation,” he said. “Earlier in the year, there was a clearer [contrast], on the one hand Obama’s more likable but people trust Romney on the economy … That’s not really holding in the current poll.”

Republicans have taken issue with more than a few national and state-level polls, which they say oversample Democrats and show Obama leading by wider margins than private polling suggests. But while GOP strategists argue with the magnitude of Obama’s advantage conveyed in public surveys, few dispute that the president is currently leading.

If private Republican polling suggests that Obama has an entirely surmountable advantage, the polls still show him with an advantage in big electoral prizes like Ohio, as well as struggling in smaller swing states such as Nevada and Colorado.

There is also fading optimism in the GOP about Romney’s ability to stretch the electoral map by competing in Democratic-leaning states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, though Romney’s super PAC is currently running a new round of TV ads in both states. Pennsylvania, where Obama has led in the high single digits and low teens, appears to have fallen off the map for Republicans entirely.

A Wednesday morning poll from Quinnipiac, the New York Times and CBS gave Obama a 6-point lead in Wisconsin and placed him over the 50-percent mark. The Michigan pollster EPIC/MRA had Obama 10 points ahead there and Romney is not running TV ads in the state.

Even if — under an optimistic scenario — Romney is actually faring 3 or 4 points better in most states than public data indicates, he would still need to make up additional ground in order to take the lead nationally.

Republican pollster David Winston said that Obama has a “small advantage” nationally at the moment, but questioned whether it was more of an edge than the incumbent has had for most of the year. The challenge for Romney, he said, was changing the contours of a race that has stubbornly resisted attempts to shake it up.

“This political equilibrium, as it exists, is a slight advantage for President Obama. The challenge for the Romney campaign is, how do they change this political equilibrium, given that additional attacks [from both campaigns] tend to reinforce the equilibrium?” Winston said. “The Romney campaign’s got to figure out a way to change that equilibrium. Because if they don’t, the race continues the way it has been.”

Ipsos pollster Julia Clark, whose firm conducts surveys for Reuters, said that Obama has a “pretty constant, couple-point lead,” though still nothing dramatically outside the range of 2 to 4 percentage points. The most encouraging trend for Obama is the modest rise in the percentage of Americans saying the country is on the right track and the economy is improving.

“That uptick in [the] sort of optimism about the direction of the country, perhaps a bit of economic optimism, is really helpful for the incumbent. That kind of thing really does benefit Obama, and I think if that continues — even if it doesn’t go up any more — I think it will make things pretty easy for an Obama win,” she said.

Clark too, pointed to the electoral college as the most dangerous obstacle for Romney.

“Both Electoral College and national numbers are showing a slim Obama victory in general at the moment,” she said.

The Romney campaign has drawn encouragement in recent days both from national polling suggesting that Obama’s convention bounce has dissipated, as well as from scattered state surveys pointing to a close race in places where Obama has long held the lead. Polls from SurveyUSA and Quinnipiac/New York Times/CBS polling have shown Obama ahead by just 1 point in Colorado, while an Albuquerque Journal poll placed Romney just 5 points back in New Mexico.

At a fundraiser in Utah Tuesday, Romney finance chairman Spencer Zwick encouraged donors to consider the data emerging from the pollster Scott Rasmussen, whose robo-dial polls consistently show Romney faring better than the bulk of national and state surveys.

“We’re seeing the polls tighten in key states,” Zwick said, according to a pool report.

But for much of 2012, Republicans had hoped to be in a better position by now than watching Obama emerge with a small lead in key swing states. Given the scale of Obama’s vulnerabilities on the economy, many in the party expected their nominee to be ahead in a number of important states by now, and probably in national polling too.

That’s not where Romney finds himself, two weeks out from the first debate. The burden is still on the GOP nominee to shift the battle lines of the race.

“Obama’s ahead by a little,” said Quinnipiac pollster Peter Brown. “Clearly the compilation of our polls and other polls indicate that the president has a small lead. Exactly what the size of that small lead is, is in some dispute.”