US Elections Analysis: Your Guide to the 3 Biggest "Swing States" and the Challenge for Mitt Romney

President Obama in Virginia Beach, Virginia on Thursday

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The contest for the next President of the United States officially began, largely unnoticed, on 22 September --- all states were required, more than six weeks before Election Day, to send absentee ballots to overseas citizens and military personnel. Some states got a head start. North Carolina has allowed absentee ballots to be cast from 6 September, and 9,365 were returned by last Wednesday morning.

But how much can we tell at this phase about the outcome on 6 November?

Ohio, the critical battleground state --- it is given a 36.1% of delivering the decisive votes in the Electoral College --- reported 42 returned ballots by military personnel as of 26 September. That is minuscule, given Ohio returned 5.2 million votes in the 2008 Presidential Election, but the figure will begin to rise after 2 October when the return of absentee ballots by civilians is permitted. The Secretary of State for Ohio has received 723,000 requests for an absentee ballot, a significant increase from four years ago. Allied with the option to vote in person the week before Election Day, more than a third of Ohio residents are likely to make a choice in advance.

That figure takes on added significance because the result is determined in a small number of the 50 states. Already the outcome in the others is close to settled: for instance, the prizes of California and New York will go to President Obama, while Texas will lead Southern states like Alabama and Mississippi in backing Romney.

After the electoral votes from these near-certainties, the election comes down to seven or eight "swing states". Of these, three --- Florida, Ohio, and Virginia --- are vital because their larger number of votes in the Electoral College. To win the election, Romney needs to triumph in two of the three. That is why more than half the money spent by both campaigns has been devoted to the trio of battlegrounds.

The cold challenge for the Romney campaign is that the polls put Obama ahead in all three. Florida is close, with President Obama enjoying a narrow 4% advantage, but in both Ohio and Virginia his lead is about 8%.

So why, despite these numbers, are Republicans hopeful that Mitt Romney can still win? Right-wing activist Erick Erickson explains:

In the obsession over polls, people are missing the Republican voter registration advantage in a number of states, including Colorado. They are forgetting the number of Democrats who simply refused to vote for Barack Obama in the primaries in various states, including Pennsylvania. They are forgetting that Republicans are right now ahead of Democrats in early voting in some key swing states, when the Democrats were ahead in those states in 2008. See e.g. Ohio.

Erickson's contention is that, while Democrats have registered more voters in most swing states, these will not turn out as they did in the "hope and change" enthusiasm of 2008. The polls assume the same level of turnout as four years ago, but Erickson insists that it is Republicans who are enthused.

Jim Geraghty at the National Review has made a similar point, noting that in Florida there are 180,000 fewer registered Democrats in 2012 while Republicans have increased their numbers by nearly 70,000.

While the scale of this shift is not disastrous for Obama, especially in Florida where 11.5 million people are registered to vote, his campaign has addressed the issue. On Wednesday night BarackObama.com sent me an e-mail "160,578 people named Lee". Beyond the trivia about the number of my namesakes registered to vote, the message implored:

Make sure your friends and family in battleground states are also registered. Our handy app makes it easy for your friends and family to get registered, in just a couple of clicks.

Republicans are relying on an enthusiasm gap between their voters and Democrats to sway this election. They hope that dissatisfaction with the Obama record will keep Democrats at home while inspiring Republicans to turn out. The general theory holds a certain logic, but when it comes specific issues, the argument is less convincing.

On Thursday, the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation released polls from Ohio, Florida, and Virginia. They showed that while the President's healthcare act is still viewed more unfavourably than favourably in Florida and Ohio, on the issue of the future of Medicare he enjoys an enormous advantage over Mitt Romney:

Asked whom they trust to deal with the Medicare program, Ohio voters side with Obama over Romney by a 19 percentage-point margin. The president has a 15-point advantage on the issue in Florida and a 13-point lead on it in Virginia. In a separate national poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation released Thursday, Obama’s 17-point lead over Romney on Medicare is larger than it has been across public polls all year.

The worry for the Romney campaign is that senior citizens are now beginning to view Medicare as an important an issue in this election as the economy. The eldeerly usually vote heavily for Republicans, but the unpopularity of the voucher plan for Medicare --- or perhaps Romney's dismissal of them as part of a mooching 47% --- is eroding that support.

Romney's campaign is in trouble everywhere it looks --- unless a deteriorating situation in the Middle East yanks voters' attention onto foreign policy concerns --- and the signals from the "swing states" suggest that the trouble will get worse rather than better as November approaches.