Josh Marshall checks in on the state of the presidential race:
Marshall notes that state polls tend to lag national polls. Along the same lines, Kornacki punctures a common style of election analysis:
There’s an assumption that Romney is automatically facing an uphill battle in just about every state that Obama carried in 2008. And since Obama’s overall poll numbers are still decent (he leads Romney by 3.3 points in Real Clear Politics’ national average), he is (not surprisingly) still ahead in most of the states that he carried in ’08, which makes it seem like Romney faces an extra-heavy lift in getting to 270. But it’s almost all an illusion.
As Mark Blumenthal noted today, if Romney overtakes Obama in the national horserace, the swing states will follow. Granted, it will take a bigger national swing to flip some states than others (a one-point Romney edge nationally probably won’t bring Pennsylvania into his column, for instance), but the Electoral College will almost certainly take care of itself if Romney is the national winner.
The Dish 