From “Mitt Romney needs poll vault to win,” Alexander Burns and Emily Schultheis, Politico:
Even if Romney were to win Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Iowa, Colorado and New Hampshire — all states Obama won in 2008 — the Republican would still be three electoral votes short of victory.
And right now, Romney is not leading in many of those states, leaving him well short of the threshold he needs to clear and under urgent pressure to reshuffle the race’s dynamics.
“The bottom line is, you’d rather be in Obama’s shoes than Romney’s. He has a lead in the battleground states and he probably has to carry fewer of them,” said Marist College pollster Lee Miringoff, who conducts swing-state polls for NBC and the Wall Street Journal.
The problem for Romney, Miringoff said, is that Romney has to be “drawing an inside straight” in the state-by-state numbers in order to cross the 270-vote threshold.
Embattled Farmers 
The problem for Romney is that he’s Romney.