Nate Silver noted today on Twitter that this race has been in a holding pattern for a couple of weeks. I tend to agree. Today's polls, while interesting in some respects, essentially represent the status quo, and therefore a 5 is warranted.
National polls were all over the place today. The NBC/WSJ poll, one of the better ones, showed the race tied at 47 among likely voters. This is a 3-point improvement for Mittens since the last poll, before the first debate. President Obama leads 49-44 among registered voters in this poll. I know the phrase "all comes down to turnout" is somewhat cliche, but the LV/RV voter gap in almost every poll seems to indicate that the more people turn up to the polls, the better Obama does. (Hmm...I wonder why the GOP is in to all these voter suppression laws!!).
Most of the daily trackers inched towards Romney today, including Rasmussen (from 48-47 Mitt to 49-47 Mitt), PPP (from Obama 49-47 to a tied race) and Gallup (from 51-45 Romney to 52-45). There was one bizarre, glaring exception and that was the IBD/TIPP poll, which showed President Obama surging to a 6 point lead (up from three points yesterday). As much as I'd like to believe that they're the only ones catching some genuine surge, this is probably just statistical noise from a pollster that has a history of erratic swings. That said, if you have been crowing about the Gallup poll (that's you, every conservative on Twitter), you should be equally anguished about the IBD/TIPP poll.
There was only one state poll that I saw today. PPP polled Florida and showed a 48-47 Romney lead, same as last week. Still a tight race there, with a minor Romney lead.
We'll see what happens to the polls after tomorrow night's final Presidential debate. I doubt the numbers will move either way, mostly because the debate is focused on Foreign Policy, which nobody really cares about this election cycle.