There’s been a lot of talk here about the candidates’ characters, legal challenges, personal outlooks towards out-groups, and so on. But, for a moment, let’s step back from emotion and look at something more concrete: polls. National and state polling are still getting their acts together — only Rasmussen is polling on a week-to-week basis for the general election — but we can get a sense of the trend lines to try to understand where the race currently is and how it might proceed from here.

(A few notes about the polls I’ll be citing, all of which are from Real Clear Politics. In 2008, RCP’s polling average was quite accurate, predicting a 7.6 percent popular vote victory for Barack Obama, who won by 7.3 percent. Despite our head-in-the-sand act four years later, RCP’s polling average correctly called the election, though not as accurately:Tthey projected that the president would win by a mere 0.7 percent; in actuality, he had a 3.9 percent advantage over Mitt Romney.)