Today's new national polls show President Obama continuing to hold off Republican challenger Mitt Romney's rise in the polls.
Obama led substantially in the national popular vote, often by as much as 5 points, before the first presidential election.
The president's lackluster performance, and Romney's better-than-expected aggressiveness caused a flip in the polls over the course of two weeks.
Romney's support rallied, and he caught up to Obama, before surpassing him in several polls, like the Gallup daily tracking poll and the Rasmussen daily polls.
Romney actually broke through the margin of error on the Gallup poll earlier this week, then extended his lead even further, to a 7-point gap. He's since fallen a bit.
The Rasmussen polls had Romney at 2 points up after the first presidential debate.
Now Obama seems to have stemmed to tide, after a much-lauded performance in the second presidential debate on Tuesday,
The polls out today show Obama holding relatively steady. Like yesterday, Romney is 6 points ahead in the Gallup poll, still outside the margin of error.
As I've mentioned before, the Gallup poll is an average of the past week's data, so it takes a while for the poll to react.
The Rasmussen poll, however, is an average of the last three days, making today the first release comprised entirely of data gathered after the second presidential debate.
Rasmussen shows Romney up by 1 point, a statistical tie, though no pollsters will ever say that.
Historically, the Gallup poll has tended to exaggerate leads, as in 2008, when it showed Obama beating McCain by a much larger margin than he actually did.
Still, the poll was right about the winner.
While Romney's numbers aren't climbing higher, the president is experiencing a much smaller bounce that Romney did after the first debate, which makes sense, since Romney's performance in the second debate wasn't panned. He is considered to have lost the match to a reinvigorated Obama, but not by much.
The candidates meet in Florida for their final debate in two days. Conventional wisdom says debates don't matter, but this campaign has proven that sentiment wrong.
Whichever candidate wins this last debate will have the better trajectory in the final weeks of the campaign, with no big events they can count on to turn the tide.
With a race this close, it may come down to the tiebreaker.
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