A short road to 2012

>>> say it's eight battleground states now since none is going to north carolina . what should we watch for? msnbc managing contributor chris cillizza , jonathan martin , and then to help me moderate the hardest -- i had to bring in the ace here, the moderator of "meet the press," david gregory . when he found out -- he said, that's always such a mess of a show. let me come in and help. david, i want to start because we had a huge moment yesterday that none of us expected. the october surprise of chris christie and barack obama .

>> you know, it's rare that you get a moment where you can play sound from the keynote speaker at the republican convention or subsequent to that saying, he's groping in the dark to find the light switch of leadership and he's not going to find it before he gets to the election and here he is yesterday in the last few days, governor christie can't say enough about the leadership that president obama has provided, that craig fugate has p provided fema and what is striking talking to people who were there, they have talked three or four times in the last 72 hours . by the time they got to the community center , there was a real bond there. i don't think they were more than two feet apart.

>> they were talking about the disaster, politics. i mean, this was the embodiment of working across the aisle. by the way, they were on marine one. it was the two of them plus two other aides. and that was -- it was fugate and two aides and jack lou.

>> when more some of the right bash christie for doing this, christie is getting angrier and angrier. he will lash out.

>> good governing and good politics. ta taking care of people in your state.

>> i agree with you on number one, colorado . florida over virginia , there will be defeat on that.

>> look, this is like be saying the onion is very thin. all of these states are very close. it's not like new hampshire is a ten-point race and colorado is a two-point race. this is up one, down one, up two, down two. the point being, a few weeks ago it seemed florida , virginia , romney 's going to win those. but it's not -- we'll get the data, there's no data that has come out of florida or virginia that says that romney has put these away. he spent yesterday in florida and today in virginia .

>> new hampshire looks like --

>> i haven't spotted two and three.

>> romney has to make up 2 1/2 points in florida and seven points in virginia . that's from the '08 numbers. and some people say there's more african-americans and hispanics in florida . true. but just from the republican winning counties and margins a few points and democratic counties --

>> florida feels like an easy compared to virginia .

>> to me the schedule is better than anything. look at obama's schedule. we're going to go ahead -- it's almost as if they were saying virginia is a luxury but in the obama campaign mind, they are awarding him florida and virginia one stop each. at the end of the day colorado seems to be there but let's give romney virginia . let's give romney new hampshire . i think our poll shows that all of the --

>> romney has been there twice.

>> let's look at this map here. let's say you did it that way and the president is spending a majority of time in these states. they continue to feel best about ohio . that means that they need either wisconsin on their own, colorado on their own, and iowa suddenly becomes a luxury and they could lose that.

>> don't you think colorado looks a little better for romney than iowa ?

>> i would think it's better for romney which means the firewall at the end of the day , there's your firewall. it's ohio and wisconsin .

>> when we started this election i feel like we were talking about the rough spell, iowa , wisconsin --

>> how about for romney ?

>> florida , getting florida , virginia , new hampshire , iowa .

>> there will be major indiscriminations from folks in wisconsin who will say governor romney , you were here on august 12th and never came back to wisconsin until the end of october.

>> david gregory , the running mate, is paul ryan .

>> right.

>> some thought it could have been rob portman . what's interesting here is that if ryan comes up short in getting wisconsin there, and he comes up short in ohio --

>> first of all, rob portman is a senior adviser and he delivered the southern part of the state in 2004 for president bush and i think that ryan gave romney a lift in intangible ways. i think there's a lot of value there and he is from wisconsin . again, i think whether it's wisconsin is the firewall as opposed to iowa is one question.

>> the problem is, it doesn't give them enough numbers if you listen to everything else.

>> it doesn't added a up in a plausible way that the four of us would say --

>> i spent two days last week in wisconsin talking to a ton of folks on both sides of the aisle. they said to me, after romney puts ryan on the ticket, the numbers moved in wisconsin for governor romney . romney never came back from is wis. wisconsin . he was back there.

>> david gregory , you lived in wisconsin in '04 with bush.

>> and he came up short.

>> absolutely.

>> let's not forget what we talked about was ohio and the fact that they didn't find a way to --

>> we'll see. i'm of the theory, either romney gets 300 plus electoral votes or --

>> or they come up short. thank you, boys. that was god.