York: For Romney, the road to victory leads to Iowa

The Washington Examiner ^ | 8/21/2012 | Byron York

[middlegeorgian]

Here's a (relatively) easy way to picture what Mitt Romney has to do to win the White House:

First, he has to win every state John McCain won in 2008. That shouldn't be a problem.

Then he has to win Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana -- three states McCain should have won in '08. That won't be easy -- right now, Virginia and North Carolina are tossups -- but it's very doable.

Next, Romney has to win two big ones: Florida and Ohio. They're tossups, too, with the RealClearPolitics average of polls giving President Obama a one-point edge in Florida and a 1.8 percent margin in Ohio. Still, it's doable, especially since some of the polls in the averages were taken before Romney got at least a small boost from picking Paul Ryan as his running mate.

But even if Romney does all that, if he takes Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Florida and Ohio from the Obama column, he still has to win one more state from Obama's '08 total. It could be Wisconsin, it could be New Hampshire, it could be Colorado. But to judge by recent campaign activity, if Romney is fortunate to make it to the brink of electoral victory, the major battle for those last few electoral votes could be in the state where it all started: Iowa.

[beenaround]

Taking an average of polls which were taken as long as 3 weeks ago is about the dumbest most misleading thing imaginable.

A poll is a snapshot in time and is accurate for the moment it was taken and not any longer.

These stories about Obama leading in the RCP poll averages are created by lib news organizations and their buddies in the polling ind. They get together and deliberately oversampling dems in order to get a poll showing Obama with a 6-10 point lead which they KNOW will pull up the RCP average and allow them to write the story they want.