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Agreed. We don’t need to shoot Rove. His analysis at this moment is likely very accurate.

But the country hasn’t engaged nor gotten to know Romney and Ryan.

Dukakis held a 17 point lead over Bush Sr. after the D convention in August of 1988.

Support for a specific candidate by an independent voter at this moment can be a mile wide but an inch deep. The polls will bounce. I think Romney will hold a lead in some national polls by next week based on Ryan enthusiasm.

With gasoline prices rising back above $4 a gallon in parts of the country I think you'll see Obama's numbers start to take a serious hit. Note that his numbers were strongest in recent months around 6-8 weeks ago when fuel prices dropped unexpectedly around the 4th of July.

For whatever it's worth, you can go back over the last 40+ years and you'll find that, almost without exception, a president's approval rating is almost inversely proportional to the price of gasoline in this country.

“Agreed. We don’t need to shoot Rove. His analysis at this moment is likely very accurate.”

I tend to agree.

Obama is starting from an “electoral vote base” that is greater than is Romney’s — simply because of the weight of numbers of having New York, California, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts and Illinois in the ‘rat’s pocket.

Couple this with the reality that several states which for years were “reliably red” or at least “contestable” seem to be slipping out of reach for the Republicans.
Examples:
New Mexico (now the second state in which Euros are a minority)
Colorado (getting pushed to the left by the “California transplants”)
New Hampshire (once quite conservative, now wobbling due to the influx of liberals from Massachusetts)
Virginia (having the same problems with incoming liberals as is Colorado, as folks move from Maryland to VA next door)

There are indeed “strong red” states, but they have smaller populations and fewer electoral votes than the heavy hitters (an exception is Texas, for the moment).

That leaves a dozen or so battleground states where the election will be decided. Romney’s challenge is that he needs almost all of them in order to reach 270 electoral votes. All Obama needs to do is prevent Romney from winning in two or three of these, and Obama will be over the top.

Perhaps the biggest cases-in-point are Ohio and Florida. Obama won Florida in 2008 by the smallest of margins, but it’s a question mark as to how the senior folks down there are going to react once the ‘rats start attacking Romney via Ryan’s plans for Social Security and Medicare. The goldens may be gullible.

Ohio is a tough road for Romney, he’s trailing there and it’s going to be a hard climb to win that one. But without Ohio, Romney won’t be president.

I had originally believed that Romney might win Ohio but lose Wisconsin, but it seems this could go the opposite way with Ryan on the ticket. But I don’t see “the switch” as giving Romney enough electoral votes to get over the top — Ohio has 20, but Wisconsin only has 10.

There are others here who will denigrate Rove for having made such a comment as he did above, but I see no reason to discount him — if there’s anyone out there who would be supporting Romney, it’s Rove. The fact that he sees problems right now, should be a warning to us all.

Yes, it’s early in the campaign yet. But there are warnings on the horizon.

They should be taken very seriously.