Meet the Press   |  September 23, 2012

Revisiting poll numbers in battleground states

A panel of experts examines the candidates’ standings in their battleground states in the 2012 presidential race.

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This content comes from Closed Captioning that was broadcast along with this program.

>>> you saw him lurking in the background, our political director chuck todd , here with some of the new polls in the battleground states . so when team romney says it's tight, that's not the full story.

>> it isn't. look at the battleground polls. this is everything that has come out in the last week in different states. and i just want to highlight a couple here. look at michigan. 14-point gap here for the president. obviously, the republicans would like to try to put michigan in play. doesn't look like it's the case. look at iowa. and i highlight that because iowa has been a toss-up state. something that has been in the middle of the battleground. guess what? we decided it is no longer in the battleground. that eight-point lead, you now put it in president obama 's column. so he sits at 243. what does that mean? it means now he's just one state away from 270. if you just give him florida, he sits at 272. but then if you look and if you look at virginia -- excuse me, virginia and ohio, two states the president had seven-point leads, and you give him those two, excuse me here, and it puts him at 274. so he's now -- we're sitting there and have shrunk the battleground, david. we have put the president obviously sitting there with a tough lead. and what has all of this done? it's all because of one thing here, and that is economic optimism. i want to show something from our last nbc/" wall street journal " poll. 42% now have optimistic views that the economy will get better in the next 12 months, the best number in almost three years, david.

>> chuck todd , thank you very