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mark@huffingtonpost.com

 

Presidential Polls Show Dead Heat Between Barack Obama, Mitt Romney

Posted: 10/22/2012 9:25 am EDT Updated: 10/22/2012 5:46 pm EDT

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Elections 2012, Barack Obama , Mitt Romney, Barack Obama 2012 , Elections 2012, Video, 2012 Polls, Obama Polls, Romney Polls, Mitt Romney 2012, Pollster Analysis, Presidential Polls, Politics News

WASHINGTON -- The latest tracking surveys continue to show a remarkably close race between President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, with Obama maintaining very narrow advantages in crucial battleground states like Ohio that will likely decide the election.
Eight new national tracking polls released since Saturday reinforce the conclusion that the race for president remains at a near deadlock nationwide. Three of the surveys give a slight edge to Romney, three give the edge to Obama and two show an exact tie, including the latest from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal.

Two of the polls are particularly at odds: The Gallup Daily tracking poll continues to give Romney an advantage of 7 percentage points (52 to 45 percent), while an Investors Business Daily/TIPP survey shows Obama with a 6-point lead (48 to 52 percent).
The differences among these surveys, whether the result of ordinary random sampling error or variations in the methods used by the pollsters, are less important for the moment than their collective finding of a near tie nationwide. The HuffPost Pollster poll tracking model, which takes into account all public polls both national and statewide, currently shows a virtual tie as of this writing. Any brief uptick for Obama since the second presidential debate has been washed out by the surveys released since Saturday.
But the near tie nationwide continues to translate into narrow but statistically meaningful advantages for Obama in a handful of states that will likely decide the outcome of the election.
In Ohio, for example, a new survey released on Monday morning by CBS News and Quinnipiac University shows Obama holding a lead of 5 percentage points over Romney (50 to 45 percent). That result represents a net 5-point gain for Romney since the previous Quinnipiac survey before the two presidential debates that showed Obama leading by 10 points (53 to 43 percent).
Obama's Ohio margin was much closer, however, on several automated telephone surveys conducted in the past week, polls that are banned by federal law from dialing cell phones. According to a recent government survey, more than half of the adults in Ohio either have only a mobile phone (33 percent) or use their mobile phone to answer most of their calls (18 percent). A live interviewer poll conducted by Fox News last week that sampled both landline and mobile phones gave Obama a 3-percentage point edge in Ohio (46 to 43 percent).