I thought it might be fun to give a somewhat arbitrary ranking of each day's polling for President Obama to get an idea of how good we should feel about the election on any given day, and to help cut through the poll clutter.
The scale will work as follows:
1-A terrible polling day for the President. The polls show Obama in worse shape than in previous days.
5-Polls show the status quo of previous days.
10-President Obama made some quality gains, and is in better shape than previous days.
Today's polls started as a pretty meh mixed bag. Rasmussen tracking was essentially unchanged, with Mitt Romney leading the President by a point, 49-48. Gallup's Likely Voter track shows Romney ahead 49-47, unchanged from yesterday, though Obama expanded his lead among Registered Voters from 49-47 to 49-46. Gallup was particularly disappointing, because last Friday, which was a bad polling day for Obama, was removed from the 7-day tracker. The IBD/TIPP tracking poll was essentially unchanged from yesterday, and it shows a tie.
Two late day state polls bring today's rankings up slightly above yesterday's status quo. PPP showed Obama leading by 5 in Ohio, which is actually an increase in his lead there from PPP's last poll two weeks ago. Particularly encouraging was that PPP indicated on Twitter that the race was roughly tied there on Friday, but Obama did quite well today. As I wrote the other day, Ohio has been a bit of a firewall for Obama. If he really leads there by 5, despite his recent polling slides elsewhere, he is still in very good shape in the Electoral College.
More interestingly, a poll from Behavior Research Center (huh?) showed Obama with a rather implausible 2 point lead in Arizona. This is out of step with all other polls there, which show a Romney lead. Nate Silver noted that this firm polled Spanish-only voters, and thus, might capture Democratic support that other polls miss.
Overall, the national polls showed little movement, but because of a couple of promising state polls, Obama's polling position was slightly improved from yesterday.