Romney's surge has ended.
The bounce in the polls Republican challenger Mitt Romney enjoyed for weeks after the first presidential debate has fizzled, though Romney retains most of the gain he managed during that time.
While President Obama has been wresting back some of that support, he still lags a bit in national polls. Relative to one another, however, the two candidates seem to have pounded each other into immobility.
The polls jump back and forth every day, but on average nothing has changed for days.
Counterintuitively, this is not a good position for Romney. He probably leads in the popular vote by a small margin, but by most accounts, he is trailing the president in key swing states.
Romney is down by about 2 points in Ohio and Iowa, and nearly 3 in Nevada.
While he leads in Florida, Virginia and New Hampshire, those states won't be enough to get him the 270 votes he needs to win the presidency.
I don't think Romney can be blamed for the fact that his rally is sputtering out. If the situation was reversed, and the president was trying to come from behind late in the campaign, the scenario would probably be similar.
This is a very divided electorate, and there's only so much progress to be made before either candidate hits a partisan brick wall.
Romney's high-water mark was a 7-point lead in the Gallup daily tracking poll, and that required a great deal of support from traditionally Democratic constituencies like women and minorities.
Americans love to think of themselves as moderate, no matter how extreme their positions might actually be. We value underdogs and close races and fighting to the very end. With Romney up, Democrats rallied and moderates reexamined their support, and public sentiment shifted back to the comfortable middle.
It's the reason the majority party almost always loses Congressional seats during midterm elections. It's the reason we tend not to have long streaks presidents from the same political party.
And it's the reason a comeback can only make a candidate go forward for so long.
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