Romney problem #34,554: Voter attitudes have hardened

Yeah, you're losing. The NBC/WSJ polls released yesterday evening have little info to cheer Republicans. But in all the bad news for them, perhaps nothing is worse than the hardening of people's choices.

In Virginia, Obama leads 49 to 44, but only 5 are undecided. Furthermore, only 2% say they might switch before election day. That means even if Romney swept all the undecided vote, he'd still only have a tie. He's got a structural problem in Virginia.

In Florida, same story: Obama leads 49 to 44, but only 5 are undecided. He could win all of them and still be no closer to victory. Same thing, only 2% say they might flip before election day. He's got a structural problem in Florida.

In Ohio, the news is devastating: Obama leads 50 to 44, and once again only 5 are undecided. If Romney swept all the remaining undecideds, he's still going to lose Ohio. Worse, only 2% might flip.

The lack of undecideds is unprecedented in modern presidential campaigns. Here are the RCP averages on this day, the last three cycles:
There aren't any poll aggregators in 2000, but you can see individual polls here. The two major party candidates were getting somewhere between the mid-80s and 90 percent.

Let's go back to 1980:

It's hard to pinpoint the exact numbers in mid-September that year, but it looks around 39-35, which would mean about a quarter of voters were undecided at this stage of that game.

It's obvious that we are a far more polarized electorate, and that our partisanship is baked in thanks to modern partisan media. That presents Romney a serious barrier toward picking up the kind of late-moving support Reagan did to seal his deal.

One last point: Some conservatives have taken to claiming that Romney will pick off all the late undecided voters. So even if Obama is at 49 percent in a poll, he's toast because all the undecideds will get Romney to 51. Obviously, that's beyond laughable. This is what happened in 2004, when the challenger was far more liked than the current one:

Sure, Kerry won more of the late-breaking vote, but not all of it. Not even close. Romney would have to win far more than 52-54 percent of that late-breaking vote to win.

At this point, the number of undecideds is so tiny that Romney needs to eat into Obama's support. And that appears as likely as Romney getting a Miss Congeniality award.