Five days on, and the aftershocks from last week’s debate continue to be felt nationwide. In liberal East Coast circles, judging from my soundings at this weekend’s New Yorker festival, dismay at Obama’s performance has turned to anger at his lack of readiness. “I can’t believe he was so arrogant to believe he didn’t have to prepare properly,” one well-known book editor told me. “I’m glad the critics panned him,” said a big-time literary agent, who in 2008 helped raise money for the President. “Hopefully, it means he’ll be more on the ball for the next one.”

In the rest of the country, voters probably took Obama’s listless showing less personally, but the damage is still being felt. Last Wednesday, Gallup’s daily tracking poll had Obama five points ahead, and Rasmussen had him two points ahead. Based on survey work done since the debates, both polling organizations now show the race dead even. Gallup has the candidates tied at forty-eight per cent; Rasmussen has them tied at forty-seven per cent.

With polls taken at the state level suggesting Romney is gaining ground in the key battlegrounds, I am making a couple of notable changes to the New Yorker electoral map, also known as Cassidy’s Count (click above to expand), moving Virginia and Colorado from the category of battlegrounds Obama should win to a toss-up. Given Romney’s surge at the national level, which has seen him gain about four or five points, these are pretty modest changes, and they leave Obama with a healthy lead in the electoral college. However, more changes could well be on the way. Evidence is mounting that things are also moving against the President in Florida, which I still regard as a toss-up, and in Ohio, which I still have in the Obama column. Pending more data from state polls, I haven’t changed my call yet in these two crucial states, but already the Mittster’s possible routes to victory are multiplying.

Last week, I projected that Obama would receive 303 votes in the electoral college and Romney would receive 206, with Florida’s 29 votes not yet allotted to either candidate. After subtracting the 22 electoral votes of Colorado and Virginia from Obama’s column, I now have him receiving 281 votes, while Romney is still stuck at 206. But with three states rather than one classed a toss-up, there are 51 electoral-college votes up for grabs—enough to get Romney much closer to the winning line of 270 votes, but not quite over it.

Everything now depends on whether Romney can sustain his momentum. In 2004, John Kerry got a similar bounce—about four or five points in the national polls—after a strong performance in the first debate, but his surge didn’t last very long. It is possible that Romney’s bounce will meet the same fate. Indeed, there is some preliminary evidence to suggest that this is already happening. In the Rasmussen tracking poll, Romney was leading by two points on Sunday, but today the two candidates are tied. Monday’s update of Gallup’s seven-day tracking poll also shows Romney’s vote share levelling out. In fact, Obama retains a five-point lead—fifty per cent to forty-five per cent—which is pretty much what he had before the debate. The difference between this poll and the Gallup poll I mentioned earlier, which has the race level, is that it is based on seven days of polling rather than three. This means that it includes data from before the debate but also from yesterday. The most recent tracking polls may even reflect Friday’s job figures, which showed the unemployment rate dipping below eight per cent for the first time since Obama came into office. The White House will be hoping that’s what is happening.

This is all broadly consistent with the message from a third tracking survey, conducted by Reuters/Ipsos. Immediately before the debate, this poll showed Obama leading Romney by six points: forty-seven per cent to forty-one per cent. By Sunday, the margin had been reduced to two points: forty-seven per cent to forty-five per cent. In the Real Clear Politics poll-of-polls, which averages all the daily tracking polls and the regular polls that are conducted nationally, the President was leading on Monday morning by just over one percentage point. (The exact figures: Obama 48.3, Romney 47.2.) This time last week, Obama was ahead by more than four points.

If the Romney surge caps out at, say, four per cent in the national polls, it would be a notable setback for the Obama campaign, but potentially a manageable one. For months now, the President has been doing better in some key swing states than he has in the country at large. Despite some post-debate state polls that have put a scare into the Democrats, that remains generally true. Still, the Romney campaign will be feeling encouraged. As I pointed out before the debate, he and his advisers knew that one good debate performance wouldn’t be enough to fully turn things around in states like Ohio and Virginia. But with four weeks left until election day, and two Presidential debates to come, they believe they are back in the game.

The next Presidential debate isn’t for another ten days. This week, most eyes will be on Thursday’s showdown between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan—an event I’ll be previewing in subsequent posts. On top of that, a lot more state polls will be published in the coming days, and I’ll be keeping a keen eye on them in case I need to make more alterations to the map. For now, though, I’m confining my changes to Virginia, where the race has always been pretty tight, and Colorado, where polls suggest Romney has enjoyed a big tick upwards in recent days. Here’s a few more details:

Virginia: Even before the debate, there was evidence that Obama’s lead in the Old Dominion, which had expanded to as much as six or eight points in some polls taken in mid-to-late September, was narrowing significantly. On Friday, a Rasmussen poll taken the day after the debate showed Romney leading by one point (49 to 48) and a second survey, from We Ask America, showed the G.O.P. candidate leading by three points (48 to 45). To be sure, both polls come with warning signs attached. They were based on automated calling, which tends to be less reliable than human questioning, and Rasmussen’s results often lean towards the G.O.P.. Still, in the middle of last month, both organizations carried out polls in Virginia that showed Obama ahead: in the Rasmussen survey, he was up by one point, and in the We Ask America poll, he was up by three points. The polls released on Friday both showed sizable swings in Romney’s favor, and it’s hard to ignore them.

Allowing for some sampling error and the different methodologies of the various pollsters, I suspect that the race in Virginia is once again very close, with Obama perhaps narrowly in front. A new poll from Public Policy Polling, which tends to lean to the Democrats, supports that interpretation. Published on Sunday night, it shows the President with forty-nine per cent of the vote and Romney with forty-six per cent. As the firm noted in a press release, Obama’s three-point lead “is the closest we’ve found the race in Virginia (in) the entire cycle.” Based on this poll and the others, I have decided to switch Virginia from Obama to toss-up.