Former Massachusetts Governor and Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s “introduction to the public has gone badly.” So say the editors of National Review, the flagship conservative journal of opinion, which Romney has worked hard to win over.

So when Romney appeared to re-launch his campaign with early television advertising in key states, eyebrows in the pundit world went up. 

“You don’t run early advertising like that unless you see something alarming in your internal polling,” one Republican media consultant who is unaffiliated with any of 2008 candidates told The Daily Acts.

And if Romney’s internal polling is similar to the public polling data that have been released recently, he indeed has cause for alarm. 

According to a Diageo/Hotline poll release on Tuesday, Romney’s Fav/Unfav ratio is just over 1:1; meaning for every one person who forms a favorable opinion of him, there is another who forms an unfavorable opinion of him. As Rich Lowry of National Review writes in “the Corner,” “Romney isn't so well known, but is barely in favorable territory, 18/15.”

Writing in the American Spectator blog, Philip Klein counters with even worse news for Romney. 

“A new Washington Post-ABC News poll is even worse for Romney: 26 percent favorable to 34 percent unfavorable, which is absolutely remarkable given his lack of name recognition,” writes Klein. “He's also the only one of the big six candidates in both parties to have a net negative rating. Giuliani has the highest rating: 64 favorable to 28 unfavorable. So in other words, more people have an unfavorable view of Romney than Rudy--even though 40 percent of people don't know enough about Romney to have an opinion, while only 8 percent have no opinion on Rudy.”

“Romney has time to turn this around,” our source tells The Daily Acts. “But that time is running out. If Romney’s current advertising blitz doesn’t move the needle, people will start to give up on him.”

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