According to Nate Silver at FiveThirty Eight in the NY Times, the President leads 50.6% to 48.5% in the popular vote and leads in the Electoral College 307--231. Obama leads in Ohio by 3%. Obama is behind Romney in Florida by less than one percentage point. In Virginia Obama leads by 1.4%
from New York Times Nate Silver: Five Thirty Eight 11/5/12
When the hurricane made landfall in New Jersey on Oct. 29, Mr. Obama’s chances of winning re-election were 73 percent in the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Since then, his chances have risen to 86 percent, close to his highs on the year.
But, while the storm and the response to it may account for some of Mr. Obama’s gains, it assuredly does not reflect the whole of the story.
Mr. Obama had already been rebounding in the polls, slowly but steadily, from his lows in early October — in contrast to a common narrative in the news media that contended, without much evidence, that Mr. Romney still had the momentum in the race.
Moreover, there are any number of alternatives to explain Mr. Obama’s gains before and after the storm hit.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Mr. Obama was adjudicated the winner of the second and third presidential debates in surveys of voters who watched them. The past month has brought a series of encouraging economic news, including strong jobs reports in October and last Friday. The bounce in the polls that Mr. Romney received after the Denver debate may have been destined to fade in part, as polling bounces often do following political events like national conventions. Democrats have an edge in early voting based on states that provide hard data about which party’s voters have turned out to cast ballots. Some voters who were originally rejected by the likely voter models that surveys apply may now be included if they say that they have already voted. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have been running lots of advertisements, which could have some effect, especially in the swing states. Mr. Obama’s voter-targeting operation may in fact be stronger than Mr. Romney’s and may have begun to show up in the polls. Mr. Obama’s approval rating is at 49 or 50 percent in many surveys, a threshold that would ordinarily predict a narrow re-election for an incumbent. Some elections “break” toward one or another candidate at the end as undecided voters tune in and begin to evaluate their decision.
If I had told you in January that Mr. Obama’s approval rating would have risen close to 50 percent by November, and that the unemployment rate would have dropped below 8 percent, you likely would have inferred that Mr. Obama was a favorite for re-election, with or without a hurricane and what was judged to be a strong response to it.
This is not to dismiss the effects of the hurricane entirely. But the fact that Mr. Obama’s rebound in the polls has been slow and steady, rather than sudden, would lend weight to some of these other ideas, even if they make for less dramatic narratives.
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from The Huffington Post;
With just one day remaining in the 2012 race for president, the polling picture is now virtually complete. President Barack Obama continues to hold narrow but significant leads over Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in enough battleground states to put him over the 270 electoral votes needed for victory.
The sheer volume of data tells us that Obama's leads in the tipping point states like Ohio and Nevada are not a matter of random chance, and there are no signs of any late breaks to Romney. If anything, the latest national polls appear to indicate a slight uptick in Obama's favor.
Before weighing those possibilities, consider the dozen or so new national polls released on Sunday. The results appear to be converging, as they often do in the final days of the campaign. A week ago, the margins separating the candidates varied between a 4-point Romney advantage and a 3-point Obama edge. Now the spread in the margins is narrower. Five of the polls show an exact tie, and seven give nominal advantages to Obama that are between 1 and 3 percentage points. The new surveys include the final national samples from the Pew Research Center, NBC/Wall Street Journal, CNN/ORC International and YouGov.
The NBC-Wall St Journal Poll gives Obama a one point lead, but the Gallup Poll (not listed in the above chart) has Romney one point ahead. The Pew Research Center ahead of Tuesday's election shows President Obama has a 3 percentage point lead. The CNN Poll has both men tied at 49%.