This should be the last day of polling that doesn't include post-debate data, so we're hoping that perhaps things pick up for Barack Obama. It's far too early to speculate on whether there will be movement back towards the President after last night's strong debate performance. This tweet doesn't sound encouraging, but I suppose we'll find out in due time.
As for today's polls, there were two big duds. The first was the eye-popping Gallup tracker which showed Romney up 51-45 among likely voters. This does not seem very plausible to me. For one, the Gallup likely voter screen was WAYYY off in 2010, underestimating the Democratic vote by about 8 points. Second, Gallup's tracker has been prone to wild inexplicable swings in the past. But I don't think we can dismiss the poll entirely. The same survey showed Romney surging to a two point lead among registered voters. And even if the six point advantage was an outlier, it's a pretty darn disturbing one.
Another bad poll for Obama was a Marquette Law poll showing him only up 1 point in Wisconsin. Mitt Romney's electoral math gets a lot easier if he could turn Wisconsin red. I'd like to see other polling there, but I believe that it's probably quite close there.
There were a couple of bright spots for the Democrats. Rasmussen's tracker moved a point towards Obama (Mitt leads 49-48). Obama still leads in the IBD/TIPP and RAND trackers. He's up by a point in a YouGov national poll. And Survey USA shows the President leading Ohio by 3 in a poll released in the last hour.
Because the Gallup poll was so glaringly bad, and because other polling was pretty mediocre, the President's standing today is slightly worse than it was yesterday. Perhaps tomorrow we'll start to see the tide turn.