Today seemed like a reversal of fortunes in the polling world. The story of the past couple of weeks has been Romney taking a small, but solid lead in the popular vote with Obama holding strong in the swing states. Today, the national polls were actually better for Obama than the state polls, for the most part.
Almost all of the tracking polls moved toward the President since yesterday. Rasmussen went from Romney +2 to a tie, Gallup went from Romney +7 to +6 among likely voters (hehe) and PPP's new tracking poll showed Obama up 1, up from a tie yesterday. The IBD/TIPP moved towards Obama as well, with the President holding a 2 point lead. A Hartford Courant national poll showed Obama ahead by 3. Combine these results, and the RCP average now has Obama back in the lead for the first time in two weeks, albeit by just .1%. Of course that average includes the wacky Gallup poll, and does NOT include the PPP tracker, or any of the internet-based surveys, which show Obama ahead. When all of the trackers move in the same direction, it is statistically unlikely to simply be random noise. It looks like President Obama's standing improved at least a small amount after Tuesday's strong debate performance.
The state polling was fine, but not great. The good people at PPP showed Obama down 1 to Romney in both Iowa and New Hampshire. The Iowa number contrasted with yesterday's NBC poll, which showed Obama up 8. While the New Hampshire poll isn't encouraging, the state's 4 electoral votes are not quite as crucial to Obama's electoral college math.
Three polls of Florida today from Rasmussen, CNN and Fox News showed Romney up by an average of 3 points, which seems about right. Obama has many paths to victory without Florida, and most of them go through Ohio, where a Fox poll this afternoon showed the President still leading by 3. Obama's Ohio lead has remained small but steady even after the first-debate. Friend of this blog Chris Bowers made a helpful spreadsheet this afternoon, showing that if you average the poll aggregators (538, RCP and Pollster), the President leads in states totaling 290 electoral votes.
My main takeaway right now is that President Obama is winning this election. It's very very close, way too close for comfort, but Obama is doing well enough in swing states and nationally (especially if you exclude Gallup) to secure a narrow win if the election were held today.