My pessimism before the debate was grounded almost entirely on the negative polling that was coming out Rasmussen. He had Romney behind in the swing states even though Rasmussen should be of all the posters the one most likely to compensate for the tendency to oversample Democrats.
If Rasmussen has Romney behind in the swing states and since Romney had to fill an inside straight among the swing states in order to get to 270, then the odds were lengthening as it appeared that more of the swing states were falling away and out of reach.
I had almost completely discounted all the other polls for over counting Democrats except to use them as trend lines.
I'm not sure even a trend line can be trusted if derived from a poll with an average 9% response rate ~ and that's what PEW says is going on.
The peeps don't have to answer their phones anymore so they're not!