Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney talks with campaign trip director Charlie Pearce, second from right, after boarding his campaign plane in Sterling, Va., Thursday. (AP)

Mitt Romney is currently in a very good position to win the presidential race. He’s had the lead in the Real Clear Politics average of polls for ten days in a row as of Thursday. Post-debate polling clearly shows more than just a bounce, but a fundamental change in the state of the race.

Even more exciting for Romney supporters should be that on Tuesday he passed the 50 percent mark in Gallup’s poll of likely voters leading Barack Obama by four points. On top of that, he was above the 50 percent mark in every poll since then and expanding the lead to six points on Wednesday to 51-45, and a whopping seven points on Thursday, 52-45.

This is clearly no longer a fluke, and no longer simply a bounce from his first debate. The first debate did launch him to the front of the polls, but if it were a bump it would have subsided eventually and it shows no sign of doing so.

Perhaps when polling starts looking at days following the second debate, Obama will rebound. However, Joe Biden’s performance last Thursday in the vice presidential debate, which was widely seen as successful, doesn’t appear to have moved the needle at all.

Many people would argue that national polls don’t matter because its the state polls that determine if Romney can win the electoral college or not. That is true, but it doesn’t provide much better news for Obama.

Suffolk University recently stopped polling in North Carolina, Virginia and Florida because they are positive these states will go for Romney. Colorado seems headed his direction as well, and the Obama campaign is considering pulling resources out of some of these swing states.

At the same time, Romney’s campaign is reportedly considering moving money towards Bluer states, such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Oregon, and others. These are all relatively reliable Democrat states, but not particularly strong ones.

In theory, based on how these states vote compared to the nation as a whole, a Republican who wins by four or more points would be very likely to win many of these states. A Republican would have to win by about 13 points to be competitive in a place like Vermont or Massachusetts.

So what this means is that if Romney thinks it is worth contesting places like Michigan or Oregon, he sees himself as ahead enough in the polls nationwide that he has a shot at winning these typically Democrat states.

Of course if he were truly competitive there, then a place like Florida, a swing state with the slightest of GOP leans, would be so reliable for Romney that Obama wouldn’t even try to contest it. Clearly this isn’t the case, but even so the map looks very good for the Republicans right now.

There is one more quirk of the system that currently favors Republicans: the possibility of an electoral vote tie of 269-269. If Romney wins all of the Bush 2004 states except for Ohio and New Mexico, then we end up with a tie. So what happens if we have a tie? The election goes to the House, where each state delegation of congressman get one vote as a whole.

The magic number here is to get 26 states to support one candidate or the other, and Republicans hold majorities in the state delegations of 29 states while Democrats only hold 15. There are an additional six which are evenly split, but with Republicans holding such a solid majority in those stakes, it shouldn’t be much trouble for them.

For this reason Romney only needs 269 electoral votes to win, and Obama needs 270 to win. It is unlikely to end up as a tie, but it is possible. Because of that, Romney seems to have a very slight advantage overall.

Keene is a junior majoring in political science, economics and public policy.