That tally reflects Trump giving up Georgia and North Carolina to Clinton, since he trails in each state according to the RCP average. Georgia is closer than North Carolina, but barely. Even if Trump wins both of those, of course, he needs to perform better than Mitt Romney did four years ago somewhere to beat Clinton. Needs to win some Obama 2012 state.

That seems unlikely. We have RCP averages for a few states, some of them quite out-of-date. (The average only updates with new polls, and states that tend to always vote the same way don't get polled a lot.) But in nearly every case where we have that data, Clinton is either leading in the state or outperforming where Obama ended up four years ago. The states below are ranked according to how close they were in 2012. Arizona is the first one on the list where Trump has a lead — but Clinton's doing almost 9 points better right now than Obama did in 2012.

The mantra of the Trump campaign at the moment, understandably, is that this can change. That's very true. Things can change. The Washington Post reports that Trump's (revamped) campaign team will focus heavily on five states: Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Obama won all of those states except North Carolina. If Trump wins all five, he wins the presidency. If he wins North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania and holds everything else — he still loses to Clinton. Trump basically has to win Florida to stay alive.

In Florida — as in four of the five states he is targeting — he currently trails Clinton. In all five, Clinton leads. In those five states and the other two polled by Quinnipiac, he is behind in all seven and in two is doing worse than Romney was at this point four years ago. Whoever was leading in each of these seven states at this point in 2012 ended up winning the state.

Notice that there were only occasional big shifts in the yellow lines on those graphs. At this point in 2012, the conventions hadn't happened, which moved them a bit. The first debate (about two-thirds of the way across) moved them more. But generally they stayed pretty even.

This story is probably fairly familiar to you by now, and it's not the case that we're alone in spelling it out.