So that didn’t last long. Three days ago Michigan topped a 5% Obama lead in my five poll average… just barely, at 5.1%. Now with a new poll, that drops back down to 4.4%. So, once again, I consider Michigan in the “could go either way” category.

We’re still right around my arbitrary 5% line, so the next poll could easily move this back above 5%. Or of course it could move things further in Romney’s direction. For the moment though, back to being close enough that we consider it within the realm of possibility that Romney takes the state in November.

Having said that, although a few individual polls have shown Romney ahead, at no time in the last year has Romney been ahead in Michigan in the five poll average. This is not one of the “closest of the close” states where the lead has gone back and forth all year. This is a state that is relatively close, but Obama has been ahead all along.

With Michigan now once again included in Romney’s best case, the new summary is:

So pretty much where we’ve been for awhile: Obama with a substantial lead. Romney still able to win if he sweeps almost all of the close states, most of which he is currently behind in.

To win Romney needs something big that changes the dynamics of the race. More of the same from both sides just ends up with a fairly comfortable Obama win.

Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.

So, just as July was very bad for Romney, August has so far been very good for Romney. Today’s move is the state of Michigan, with 16 electoral votes:

Over the course of the last year, Michigan has polled all over the place, ranging from Polls showing Romney ahead by 5%, to polls showing Obama ahead by 18%. A huge range. More recently the five poll average had an Obama lead of 6%. Today’s update pulls that down to 4%. Since that is below my 5% threshold, Michigan once again goes into the “could go either way” category. 4% is just a very slim lead that can disappear pretty easily with the back and forth of the news cycle. This of course improves Romney’s “Best Case” in my model:

With this update, Romney’s “best case” (where he wins ALL the close states) is better than it has been since February. Over the past few weeks, he has diminished Obama’s lead in several critical states. The “current” line in my model, where each candidate wins all the states they are even slightly ahead in, has stubbornly stayed still at Obama 332 Romney 206 for almost three months now. But getting states close has to happen before states jump over the line.

There are now 9 states where Obama is ahead, but by less than a 5% margin… which can be considered very vulnerable. Of those Obama’s leads in Florida (29 ev), Ohio (18 ev), Virginia (13 ev), Colorado (9 ev) and Iowa (6 ev) are all actually less than *2%*. Those five states could really flip at almost the drop of a hat. They are right on the edge. That is 75 electoral votes right on the verge of going over to Romney’s side of the fence with a few positive news cycles for Romney. And guess what. Move those 75 votes to the other side and Romney wins 281 to 257.

Obama is still significantly ahead in the electoral college analysis at the moment. And Romney has never been ahead in this analysis. But the above serves to show just how quickly things can change. Over the last few weeks things have moved quite nicely in Romney’s direction and there are a lot of states that could easily move further.

This isn’t even close to over yet. The amount of time left is getting shorter all the time, but if Romney keeps things moving in this direction, this could get very interesting!

Note: Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate and show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.

Chart and map from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no strong third party candidate. Both show polling as it currently exists. Things will change before election day. On the map red is Romney, blue is Obama, gold states are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate would have than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.

One state changing status today, and it is a big one heading in Romney’s direction…

So Michigan, where as recently as the end of May, Obama’s lead in the five poll average had been more than 10%, is now too close to call as Obama’s lead falls below 5%. The state is still leaning Obama, but with the five poll average at an Obama lead of only 4.8%, that lead could disappear overnight with the right combination of events.

This change in Michigan has been very dramatic. In fact, the rapidity with which Obama’s lead in Michigan collapsed should be a reminder than things can and do sometimes change quickly. It is tempting to say in retrospect that the two polls in February showing Obama with 15%+ leads in February may have been outliers… without them the drop would look less dramatic, but still… with sparse polling it is hard to distinguish outlier polls from actual movements in opinion. And there were two of them, not just one. These could have been outliers, but in February Romney was getting beaten up in Michigan by Santorum, so a decline in his support at that time also seems reasonable.

In either case, the most recent five polls show a close race, slightly in Obama’s favor, so Michigan is once again a swing state in our model. This improves Romney’s “best case” where we have him winning all of the states that are currently “close”:

At this point Romney’s best case gives him 28 more electoral votes than is needed to tie. This makes Florida the only “must win” state. Romney can now afford to lose any one of the other close states, or multiple of the smaller close states. He has many more paths to victory than he had a few weeks ago.

Romney’s “Best Case” line is now better than it has been since February. It finally looks like Romney may have put most of the damage caused by the primary season behind him, and is now pulling things his direction… moving this in the direction of actually becoming a competitive race. Romney’s best case still isn’t back where it was in January, but it it certainly looks a lot better for him than it did in April and May, at least in terms of his best case.

Now, the “everybody wins every state they are even slightly ahead in” line still shows a pretty clear Obama victory. But in order to bring states onto your side of that line, you first have to bring down Obama’s lead in those states… and that is exactly what has been happening. Romney is pulling states that looked pretty safe for Obama and starting to make them competitive. If the trend continues, he will start to pull into the lead in some of those… and maybe take some that look competitive now and make them start looking like safe Romney states.

It has also been a bad couple weeks for Obama in the news cycle of course. It is also possible recent events will blow over and Obama will pull some of these states back in his direction. Stay tuned.

Map and chart from the Abulsme.com 2012 Electoral College Prediction page. Both assume Obama vs Romney with no third party strong enough to win states. On the Map Red is Romney, Blue is Obama, Gold States are too close to call. Lines on the chart represent how many more electoral votes a candidate has than is needed to tie under several different scenarios. Up is good for Obama, Down is good for Romney.

At some point things have to stop getting worse for Romney, right? As he pivots from the primaries to the general election, he’ll start pulling back support from the middle and start gaining ground again, right? Well, probably. But not yet. In today’s update the 5 poll average for Michigan moves to Obama having more than a 10% lead in that state. So we color the state dark blue. Essentially this means it is a state Romney probably shouldn’t bother putting any resources into at all. The situation may change later, but for the moment, it is out of reach.

Since Michigan isn’t moving in or out of Swing State status, the overall summary remains the same with Obama clearly the favorite by a large margin, but Romney still being able to squeak by with a win if he manages to sweep all of the too close to call swing states:

One thing to keep in mind at this stage is that state polling is still sparse. So the “five poll averages” I use for this analysis can cover a lot of time. For instance, in Michigan my five poll average currently has polls that were done all the way back through January. (Specifically it includes one from January, two from February, one from March and one from April.)

There are still just a handful of state polls per week. Some states actually haven’t even been polled at all and I’m extrapolating based on the 2004 and 2008 elections. I’m also doing a straight average, not a recency weighted average. Because of this, this analysis will react more slowly to changes in the political situation.

At least that is the situation here in April. As we get closer and closer to November, we’ll have a faster and faster pace of polls. By the time we get to October we will have many new state polls every week, and changes in this analysis will be much more frequent and catch changes faster.

Edit 2012 May 30 15:49 UTC: It turns out that between the last update on Mar 30 and this one New Hampshire should have moved from Weak Romney to Lean Romney on Mar 31. At that time however, I was missing some polls and thought New Hampshire was already Lean Romney, so no update was posted. This is corrected in the historical charts starting on May 30.