Republican challenger Mitt Romney's lead in the national polls has ended.
It has now been five days since any major poll has shown Romney ahead. Several put Romney and President Obama in a tie, but that it a much-improved situation for Obama, who had been trailing by up to 7 points in recent weeks.
To be sure, the Gallup daily tracking poll, which showed the largest leads for Romney, has been suspended in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
But the IBD/TIPP poll has also been suspended, and that one regularly showed leads for Obama, even when most other polls did not.
The Rasmussen daily tracking poll, which has continued despite the destruction from Sandy, shows the candidates tied, at 48 percent even.
A Fox News poll from earlier in the week finds the same result.
But both a CBS News/New York Times poll and an ABC News/Washington Post poll show Obama leading by a point, a remarkable turnaround in the last week of the campaign.
RealClearPolitics, which aggregates national polls to give a single average of all available data, now gives Obama a 0.3 percent lead in the popular vote, undoing the lead Romney has had for most of the last month.
The prediction market Intrade, which allows betting on future events, including the presidential race, gives Obama slightly less than 2 in 3 odds to win the election.
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight pegs Obama's chances at 81 percent, though he bases his prediction on the Electoral College count, which actually determines the winner of the election.
While Obama was behind in national polls, it appeared as though there might be a split between the Electoral College and the popular vote, which has only happened four times in American history, though it occurred as recently as 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote but lost Florida and the Electoral College to George W. Bush.
Now the national polls and swing state surveys are coming back into line with each other, and not in the way Romney had hoped.
No matter his efforts in boosting his numbers nationwide, it is the swing states that will decide this election, and there he is faltering.
Obama is up in Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire and, most dangerously for Romney, in Ohio, whose 18 electoral votes makes the difference between a win and a loss for either candidate in most of the likely Electoral College scenarios.
Romney is pouring his resources into Ohio in these last desperate days, but Obama is doing the same.
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