President Obama has a lot of work to do

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I don't think the president just threw in the towel last week, giving away the election, and I think Andrew Sullivan's overreacting a bit, but, needless to say, these numbers are bad. Very, very bad:

Romney has drawn even with Obama in the presidential race among registered voters (46% to 46%) after trailing by nine points (42% to 51%) in September. Among likely voters, Romney holds a slight 49% to 45% edge over Obama. He trailed by eight points among likely voters last month.

And it's even worse than that:

Coming out of the debate, Mitt Romney's personal image has improved. His favorable rating has hit 50% among registered voters for the first time in Pew Research Center surveys and has risen five points since September. At the same time, Obama’s personal favorability rating has fallen from 55% to 49%.

In the presidential horserace, Romney has made sizable gains over the past month among women voters, white non-Hispanics and those younger than 50. Currently, women are evenly divided (47% Obama, 47% Romney). Last month, Obama led Romney by 18 points (56% to 38%) among women likely voters.

Okay. (Deep breath.) Romney won the debate and got a boost. But... really? Was the debate so decisive that it erased an 18-point Obama lead among women?

I'm not saying the numbers are wrong -- no right-wing "truther" am I -- but I think what we're seeing is some settling of the numbers. Obama was certainly ahead by a fair margin going into the debate, but he probably wasn't that far ahead.

And while Romney lied his ass off in the debate (making the numbers all the more troubling, showing that people were taken in by his lies), he was able to make the case, on a major national stage, that the economy is still strugggling and that change is needed. (It hardly matters what change, as people are generally prepared to blame the sitting president for the weak economy, even if it's a lot better than it was when he took office and the recovery is doing fairly well, though Romney's dishonest portrayal of himself as a sensible moderate certainly did a great deal to convince persuadable voters that he's okay.) That message clearly resonated.

I'll leave this to expert polling analysts like Nate Silver, but my sense is that there was significant "soft" support heading into the debate to allow for this sort of shift. And maybe Romney, simply by virtue of appearing to be a credible (and not crazy) candidate, was able to win back some of the support he had lost to Obama in the aftermath of the Democratic convention.

But there's more, and it comes down to this: Let's not make too big a deal of this one poll (from Pew). As Nate Silver tweeted yesterday:

So the Pew poll really is a huge data point for Romney. But his polling today was pretty mediocre without it. 

And as Steve M. notes, "the press and blogosphere and Twittersphere are ignoring [other] polls and obsessing over Pew":

This just tells me that the press is, for the moment, on Romney's side -- that's the real story here. Yes, I think Romney got a bounce, but I think the bounce brought the race more or less to parity, which is where it is in the Real Clear Politics poll average. (Talking Points Memo still has Obama up by 2.7 -- and oh, look, Mitt's still down by nearly 4 in RAND's multiple-decimal-point poll.) I'm sorry, but Romney hasn't done anything to build on that strong debate -- his foreign policy speech was a flop, and no one except his base wants to hear a Republican rabble sabers. It will worry me if we're still talking Obama's-in-trouble by the end of the week, and it will worry me if Obama and Biden have any more bad debates. But Mitt Romney is still a weak candidate. Obama's advertising and messaging have defined him as such, as have Romney's own words and deeds. Polls in the next few days should confirm that.

I certainly hope so. Because while I'm trying not to let the polls bother me too much, another debate performance like the one we saw last week could really mean the end for Obama.