Seven swing state polls came out today and each showed President Obama with a decisive advantage over Mitt Romney, making this a bad start to the week for the Republican presidential nominee.
In Colorado, Public Policy Polling gives Obama a six-point lead over Romney. In Michigan, Rasmussen puts Obama 12 points ahead of Romney, 54 to 42, which is similar to the results in Wisconsin, where We Ask America gives Obama a double-digit lead, 53 to 41. According to the latest polls from American Research Group, Obama is ahead by seven points in Iowa and Nevada, and by 5 points in Florida, 50–45. Finally, the conservative Civitas Institute released a survey of North Carolina, which found Obama with a four-point lead over the former Massachusetts governor, 49 percent to 45 percent.
If you're unconvinced that the race isn't a toss-up, keep in mind that Obama is leading in every single national poll. Even pollsters with Republican-friendly results, like Rasmussen, show a race that has broken in favor of the incumbent:
There isn't much time left in the election, and we're reaching the point where polls become highly predictive-as Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien note in The Timeline of Presidential Elections, the candidate who leads at this point in the race almost always goes on to win on election day. Barring a major exogenous event-like economic collapse in Europe-Romney faces extremely long odds for the White House.
