In today's update, the national polls are all over the map. While a more coherent picture of the presidential campaign may emerge over the next few days as data from after the final presidential debate filters in, for now different polls are telling very different stories.
In today's Gallup daily tracking poll, support for Republican challenger Mitt Romney fell by a point, though he still leads President Obama by 5 points, a gap that's still outside the margin of error.
Rasmussen has Romney climbing 2 points in the polls, to a 4-point lead over Obama, also outside the margin of error.
However, remember that Rasmussen uses "robo-calling," and that tends to skew about 2 points conservative. While Romney is up, it's likely not a huge lead.
IBD/TIPP turns the tables, showing Obama up by 2 points, though that's a smaller lead than he had on Monday.
A CBS News poll out late yesterday put Obama at a 2-point lead, while an ABC News/Washington Post poll gives him a narrow 1-point lead.
And a Washington Times/JZ Analytics poll has Obama up by 3 points. However, given the political proclivities of the Times, I'm skeptical of any results they offer.
As is often the case when faced with large amounts of disparate data, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. If some polls have Romney far ahead, and others show Obama leading the race by a large margin, and still other polls say there's a tie, the race is probably extremely close.
In fact, FiveThirtyEight found exactly this result when averaging 15 national polls: the net result is a dead-even tie.
Of course as I've said before, many of these polls, particularly the daily polls, are behind in public sentiment because they use a rolling average. Over the next few days we'll begin to get data gathered after the final presidential debate, and that should give a clearer picture of the trajectory of the remaining two weeks in the race.
With Obama considered the winner of Monday night's debate, even a small bump in his numbers could push the race in his direction.
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