Tuesday's Polls Are Full of Woe

--if you're Mitt, that is.

Though the Gallup tracking poll tightened, the NBC/WSJ likely voter poll shows President Obama at the magic 50%, with Romney at 45.
(Among registered voters Romney slips to 44%.)  President Obama's approval rating is also at 50%, the highest it has been since March.  Other recent credible national polls also put the margin at 4 or 5%.

A couple of new polls join one from Monday that show President Obama significantly ahead in Virginia.

And a NYT/CBS poll released Wednesday morning of likely voters in Wisconsin where Romneyryan had been leading slightly, has reverted to a 51-45 lead for President Obama.  That includes a 17 point lead in "cares about my needs and problems."  The NBC national poll also shows a significant Obama lead in who will be better for the middle class.

Two national polls and one Virginia poll show that voters were watching the events in Libya and Egypt last week, and nearly half approved President Obama's response while nearly half didn't like Romney's responses. 

Still, for all the words about the wheels coming off the Romney campaign, and the horrible three weeks he's inflicted, the core split is still there, with that stubborn mid-40s percentage support remaining for Romney.  Still, G.W. eventually cratered below what was supposed to be his unassailable base of support, though he did that when he was no longer running for anything.

Some also note that the Obama surge correlates with a period in which the Obama campaign's ad spending in the swing states was temporarily higher than Romney's.  That's not going to happen again, unless the donor wheels also fall off in the next few weeks.

So the Romney campaign's chief hope is in the millions of dollars yet to be spent by his outside megapacs, and in voter suppression, which despite high profile court defeats, is still going strong in the key states of Florida and Ohio, and will continue through election day and possibly beyond. 

The internals of the polls now truly suggest that Romney is unlikely to gain much ground.  Of the states that Obama won in 2008, only Indiana seems already lost.  North Carolina and Colorado are iffy.  But the Romney campaign must know that it cannot win without Ohio and Florida (especially if Virginia is getting away from them) and so their voter suppression efforts will be concentrated there.