One the strange things we've seen, thus far, this electoral season, is that divergence between swing-state polling and general election polling. The charts below visualize this discrepancy.

President Obama is clearly overperforming in the swing states, which hold the keys to the election, but is weak nationally. What is the reason?

The key lays not in Obama, but in Mitt Romney.

 

Mitt Romney, who has been running for President for nearly six years now, was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Usually, this is a coronation process, but, in this cycle, we saw something different. Instead of the party coalescing around their frontrunner, we saw chaos.

A repeated pattern began to emerge. The more people got to now Romney, the more the disliked him