Battleground snapshot: Romney can't break out

Winning. Time for the weekly look at the battleground numbers. But first of all, a quick glance at the TPM national polling composite. A week ago, Pres. Barack Obama led Mitt Romney 47.2 to 45.8. Today, it's 47.8 to 46.0. So a slight improvement.

But as you all know, I don't care much for the national numbers. The numbers that matter are those from the States That Matter:

You might notice that I've pulled Missouri from the chart. Romney now has a double-digit gap, and has been over 50 percent in several polls. For now, it doesn't look competitive. If that changes, I'll bring it back. But I wouldn't hold my breath. If Missouri becomes competitive, so will Montana and Georgia and maybe North Dakota, and at that point, we're in "massive rout" territory.

Speaking of Georgia, it would be nice to see more polling there. One recent poll, albeit from an outfit I don't recognize, had it Romney 49, Obama 46. However, there's no other recent polling to compare it to. Heck, I'd even welcome a Rasmussen poll of Georgia, just because.

Michigan is the least encouraging news of the bunch, but those numbers factor in two bizarre new and obscure polling outfits. Nate Silver takes them to task here, concluding:

[T]he methodological choices that these polls have made are hard to defend. Perhaps 90 or 95 percent of the time, taking a simple average of the polls will work just about as well as the more complicated FiveThirtyEight method. But this is rare instance where taking all the polls at face value may be a mistake [...]

If you take out those two weird pollsters, the Michigan numbers are 47.8 Obama, 41.9 Romney'certainly more inline with what most political observers expect out of the state.

Beyond that, most changes were marginal. But what continues to strike me as most significant is Romney's inability to break out of the mid-40s. Of the 12 battleground states, he hits 46 percent in just five of them, and gets to 47 percent in just North Carolina, where he leads narrowly, and in Wisconsin, where the Republican ticket is experiencing a Paul Ryan boost.

Ann Romney set out on Tuesday to change the narrative of her husband. If you believe the Gallup daily tracker, that hasn't happened. Last night, desperation veep Ryan tried to lie his way into a new electoral reality. It's too early to tell if that had an impact, poll-wise, but the media reaction hasn't been as kind as Republicans are used to.

And tonight Romney gives his last-ditch effort to make a clear and direct case for himself. Because after tonight, it'll be all attack ads and two three debates in which Obama will be able to rebut every piece-of-shit lie Romney flings.

Will this all add up to the 11-point swing Team Romney claimed they'd get? Time will tell. But if I had $10,000 to bet, I'd place it all on "no."