Some critical swing states appear even more ambivalent in today's Electoral College update.
New polls show mixed support for both candidates in Iowa, Colorado and Virginia, with a few off-trend outliers in both Florida and Ohio.
President Obama has had a decent showing in Florida recently, but most polls show Romney with a consistent lead since the week after the first presidential debate.
That's good news for Romney, as he needs to hold on to Florida to have a hope of hitting the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.
Romney seems quite secure in North Carolina, but he really wants to pick up Virginia to cement his run in the South. That would leave him only 22 votes shy of winning outright.
But polls in Virginia have been back-and-forth for weeks. The same is true in Colorado, and Iowa--which had been consistently blue until this week--joins them, throwing electoral predictions into chaos.
With Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan looking solid for Obama, the president is just 17 electoral votes short of take the election.
A win in Ohio is enough to put him over the top, and he leads in every poll in that state in the last week except for one.
Obama could also take Virginia and any other state, as well as the triple combination of Iowa, Colorado and New Hampshire.
Any of those scenarios are doable for him.
For his part, if the swing state pendulums stay put for just a few more days, Romney needs Ohio to win. Even if he sweeps every other state in play, he still falls short of a win without Ohio.
There's really no other play for Romney. The other options for electoral votes have dried up at this point.
Obama's support in Nevada is buoyed by a large Latino population, which approves of the president's program to provide work permits for young undocumented immigrants brought into this country as children, a program Romney has said he will end if elected.
Pennsylvania has polled consistently blue, and like Michigan and Wisconsin, voters in the Rust Belt have suffered less than most during the recession because of Obama's auto-industry bailout.
These same reasons make Romney's push in Ohio difficult. Ohio voters are doing better than most other people around the country, and with all the media coverage, they're well-aware of that.
Every organization that can spare money or resources is pouring it into Ohio, in a last-ditch push to change minds and get bodies to the polls.
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