Several recent polls (but not all of them) show Mitt Romney virtually tied with Barack Obama in a hypothetical presidential match-up. However, those numbers don’t fully reflect the difficulty facing the presumptive Republican nominee.
The chart above, based on a new CNN poll, clearly indicates that Romney has a lot of ground to make up if he is to win over a majority of the electorate with respect to certain potentially decisive factors.
Notice that Obama’s numbers are in the 40-to-50-percent range or a bit higher in every category, while Romney’s numbers are mostly below 30 percent.
Steve Benen EXPLAINS the significance of all this.
The good news for Mitt Romney is that a Washington Post/ABC News poll shows his favorable numbers among Republicans increasing to a record high. Now that the race for the GOP presidential nomination is effectively over, the party’s rank-and-file is starting to get in line, just as the former governor had hoped.
The bad news for Romney is that no one else seems to like him very much.
(Snip)
[I]n the television era, the candidate who’s better liked is generally better positioned to win, and at least at this point, voters’ perceptions of Romney just aren’t favorable at all. After nearly six years on the national campaign trail, Americans don’t seem to like the guy.
Making matters worse, this isn’t an easy problem to fix.
