Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is now leading President Barack Obama by just 3 points in the latest Gallup Daily Tracking Poll.
That’s down 2 points from Romney’s 5-point lead among likely voters on Tuesday, the day after the former Massachusetts governor’s final debate with Obama in Florida. It also is down a point from his 6-point lead on Monday. Romney had a 7-point lead on Sunday, the largest of the campaign.
But the poll also shows that Obama has regained the lead among registered voters, 48 to 47 over Romney. It’s the first time Obama has led among registered voters in the poll since Oct. 14.
The presidential race is now trending toward Obama, meaning that Romney's lead has been reduced in recent days, according to Gallup.
The survey of 2,700 likely voters between Oct. 17 and 23 was taken after the last two debates, in which Obama gave stronger performances than in his first outing with Romney on Oct. 3 in Denver, Gallup said.
The Gallup poll has been dismissed by Democrats and even some independent political analysts as an aberration because other surveys show a much tighter, even deadlocked, race. But Romney campaign officials have dismissed that as carping by Democrats and mainstream media pundits leaning to Obama.
Less than three weeks ago, many Republicans were critical of the pollsters and the methods they used, accusing them of oversampling Democrats. Now liberals are the ones complaining about what they perceive as distorted results.
Other polls released Wednesday indicated a tightening race that many pundits said was simply too close to call.
An ABC News-Washington Post poll put the candidates in a statistical dead heat, with Obama’s 49-to-48 edge within the poll’s margin of error, while an IBD-TIPP poll showed the president with a 47 to 45 advantage.
According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Romney leads by less than 1 percentage point nationally, 47.9 to 47.2.
The latest Investors Business Daily/TIPP tracking poll shows President Obama with a 3-point lead over his Republican challenger.
The poll released on Wednesday had Obama at 47.3 percent and Romney at 44.3 percent, according to a report in Business Insider.
Obama had been leading by two points in the prior IBD/TIPP survey.
But Romney was 1 percentage point ahead of Obama in Wednesday's Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll. In a reversal of Tuesday's results, Romney led Obama among likely voters by 47 percent to 46 percent, a statistically insignificant margin, in the four-day online tracking poll.
But Obama had a lead of 53-42 percent among the 17 percent of the surveyed registered voters who said they had already cast their vote.
Like many other polls, the rolling Reuters/Ipsos poll has shown a tight race since shortly after the two candidates met for their first debate on Oct. 3. The two met for their third and last debate on Monday and most surveyed voters said the face-off did not change their view of either candidate.
Meanwhile, the latest Rasmussen Reports swing state tracking update released Wednesday showed a solid lead for Romney.
The report showed that of 11 key swing states, Romney holds 50 percent of the vote compared to Obama's 46 percent — giving the Republican candidate a 4 percentage point advantage.
Romney has hit the 50 percent mark in that combined swing states poll four times in five days, according to Rasmussen Reports
"The survey is conducted on a rolling seven-day basis, and most of the interviews for today's update were completed before the end of Monday night's presidential debate. Romney has now held a modest lead for 13 of the last 16 days; Obama was ahead twice, and the candidates ran even once," Rasumussen said in an analysis released with the poll.
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