President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede. 
 
 The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor. 
 
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 (Also on POLITICO: 8 takeaways from the DNC) 
 
 “Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obama’s favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but it’s extremely difficult. 
 
 The Obama and Romney campaigns anticipate little movement in national polls before the first debate on Oct. 3, which both see as the most important day of this campaign. They also see eye to eye on their belief that the election will come down to whether Romney can persuade voters he understands the problems of ordinary people and that his solutions are at least marginally better for turning things around economically. 
 
 Where the two camps differ — and differ starkly — is on their theories of the case for navigating the final nine weeks. Romney, armed with more dismal jobs numbers, will run a one-size-fits-all campaign, wrapped around the message that the economy is bad, Obama is to blame and that change of leadership is absolutely essential. The Republican plan rests heavily on Romney’s capacity to bury Obama with negative ads — and reap the benefits of his billionaire backers hitting the president even harder, and more relentlessly. This, more than anything else, alarms the high command in Chicago. 
 
 A Democratic official said the other big worry for the Obama campaign is that when you dig into the small slice of undecided voters (probably only 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate, according to the campaigns), the demographics are not favorable to Obama: mostly white, many with some college education, economically stressed, largely middle-aged. 
 
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 “Many of them voted for Obama in 2008 and felt good about that vote, and still think Obama’s a good person who really tried hard, but the economy sucks for them,” said the Democratic official, who has access to reams of internal polls and focus groups. 
 
 Despite that, Obama officials have maintained for several weeks that there are too few undecided voters for Romney to get the bounce he needs from the debates. “Romney is not going to win undecided voters 4-to-1,” a senior administration official told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “If you are losing in Ohio by 4 or 5 points and trailing in Colorado by 2 points, if you are trailing in Nevada by 2 or 3 points, you are not going to win in those states. 
 
 “There is a small number of undecided voters so you are not going to see tremendous movement out of these conventions, even out of the debates. … [W]e have a small but important lead in battleground states that is a huge problem for the Romney camp. … Ohio needs to be tied, Florida needs to be tied at least.” 
 
 Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, said the campaign will draw from “a cavalcade of devastating statistics that indicate where the country is,” including an increased use of food stamps, higher poverty rate, bleak jobs figures and the exploding debt. ||||| AP 
 
 The Mitt Romney campaign circulated a statement Monday from its pollster, Neil Newhouse, conceding that President Barack Obama "has seen a bounce from his convention" in daily tracking polls but urging readers not to "get too worked up about the latest polling." 
 
 Newhouse characterized the recent shift to Obama as "a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions" and argued that the "basic structure of the race has not changed significantly": 
 
 All Signs Point to a Tight Race: Those watching the daily tracking polls know that, while the President has seen a bounce from his convention, his approval has already begun to slip, indicating it is likely to recede further. In eight states, Pollster.com's reporting of the most recent statewide polls puts the margin between the two candidates at less than three points, virtually guaranteeing a tight race. 
 
 In a related development, Rich Lowry of the National Review shares a comment from an unnamed Romney adviser who describes as "horses**t" reports that the Romney campaign "knows it's losing and that Ohio is slipping out of reach" in the wake of a weekend automated poll by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling (PPP) showing Obama with a 5 percentage point lead in Ohio: 
 
 Nobody in Boston thinks we're going to lose. We're in a tight race. We had a 4-5 point bounce after our convention and it evaporated when they had theirs. Now they have a 4-5 [point] bounce. It's going [to] evaporate in September. We feel good about the map. We're up with advertising in Wisconsin and I think North Carolina is going to come off the board. On Ohio, they've been spinning for months now that it's out of reach. There was a Columbus Post-Dispatch poll last week that had it 45-45. That's a more accurate picture of the state of the play there than any of the spin. PPP has these polls that just put chum in the water for the media. Sometimes I think there's a conscious effort between the media and Chicago to get Republicans depressed. 
 
 A poll tracking model created for HuffPost Pollster by political scientist Simon Jackman, based on all polling at the national and state levels, shows that the conventions have helped boost Obama's share of the vote to his highest levels since early March. The model currently has Obama leading Romney by 3 percentage points.
– President Obama's DNC acceptance speech may have inspired more yawns than fervor, but the latest polls are showing him a clear advantage, especially in several key swing states, reports Politico. Republican officials admit that their in-house tracking polls show Obama with a high-single-digits lead in crucial battleground state Ohio. While Mitt Romney can win the presidency without Ohio, it would be very tough. “Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a leading Republican official. The biggest worry for Democrats at this point is that the 6% to 8% of voters who are still undecided are overwhelmingly white, middle-aged, and economically stressed—bad demographics for Obama. But with polls showing a small but clear bounce for Obama, the president is now a "reasonably clear favorite," writes Nate Silver at the New York Times. Obama is now leading by four percentage points in Gallup's national tracking poll, two in Rasmussen's, four in Ipsos', and three in RAND's polling. Campaign officials say they don't expect many big changes over the next couple of weeks, as attention turns to Oct. 3 and the first presidential debate.