[Spiff]

Check my FReeper profile page. There you will see composites of early state polls and national polls. Romney leads in early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. Romney is within the Margin of Error of Fred Thompson on Rasmussen's daily national poll.

Romney is just on the edge of the MoE behind Thompson on an averaged composite of the last 5 national polls taken.

Giuliani 24%
Thompson 17.2%
Romney 13.2%
McCain 12.6%
Huckabee 11.2%

Note: 4 Rasmussen Daily Tracking Polls and 1 Quinnipiac Poll national polls used for the above averages.
Margin of Error for Rasmussen is +/- 4 points
Margin of Error for Quinnipiac is +/- 3.6 points.

The RCP average the you quote goes all the way back to 10/14 and is an average over 2.5 weeks. That's not a good way to deterimine where the candidates actually stand as of today.

More important than national polls are the state polls. Especially the early states. Romney is leading in nearly all of those. Remember that the primary is not a national primary run on a single day. It is a series of state primaries.

[Plutarch]

Summary from Intrade:

Republican Nomination Market

This weeks trading has seen Rudy Giuliani’s comfortable grip on the market loosen. The market leader saw his value slip from 44.4 to 41.1 over the past seven days, a loss of 3.3 points. This is his largest single week loss since he slipped 3.9 points back in May ’07 and lost his position as market leader to John McCain.

Mitt Romney responded to his rival's weakness with a nice gain. His current price of 27.0 is a 2.7 point boost from last weeks value of 24.3 and is a record high for the former Governor of Massachusetts. He now sits 14.1 points behind Giuliani after trailing by 20.1 points seven days ago. 

Fred Thompson continues to trade at new lows, although this weeks losses are not as severe as those suffered in the previous fortnight. He is currently trading at 9.9, which is down 1.7 points from last weeks value of 11.6. 

John McCain now trails Thompson by just 2.8 points, although the Senator from Arizona did suffer a minor loss this week himself. His current price of 7.1 is down 0.2 points from last weeks value of 7.3.