Polls

Two recent polls maintain that Republican Tom Smith of Pennsylvania is statistically tied with his Democratic opponent, Bob Casey Jr., in the race for the U.S. Senate. The first poll, an internal Smith poll released Friday, shows the candidates tied at 46 percent.

The four polls taken this week in Iowa that are listed by RealClearPolitics show widely different results.  NBC/WSJ/Marist shows President Obama up by 6 percentage points — 50 to 44 percent.  Gravis Marketing

Mitt Romney and President Obama are now tied in the RealClearPolitics average of recent national polling, thanks in large part to the United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll released Wednesday afternoon.

“We feel that we are in a very, very good place, that this race is exactly where we hoped it would be a week out,” said Russ Schriefer, a senior advisor to Mitt Romney, on a Wednesday conference call with reporters. Schriefer says the Romney campaign remains convinced that the fundamentals of the race favor the Republican, even as polls show the race remains tight in important swing states like Virginia, Ohio, and Iowa.

There is a peculiar divergence between various public opinion polls at the moment. On the one hand, Mitt Romney has built a narrow but durable lead in the national polls, averaging around a 1 percent advantage over the last three weeks. This has cheered the hearts of conservatives everywhere.

The latest state-by-state polling from Rasmussen Reports shows Mitt Romney leading President Obama by a tally of 279 to 243 in projected electoral votes.

On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume highlighted Mitt Romney’s clear advantage in Gallup, Rasmussen, and other national polling, and said, “Now…if those polls are generally correct, it is difficult to imagine that Ohio would be all that different.  Ohio has pretty closely tracked the national outcome…since about 1960.”

The bipartisan Battleground Poll, in its “vote election model,” is projecting that Mitt Romney will defeat President Obama 52 percent to 47 percent.  The poll also found that Romney has an even greater advantage among middle class voters, 52 percent to 45 percent.

On September 11, 2012, Rasmussen Reports had President Obama's job approval at 52 percent approve, 47 percent disapprove.

With a week to go until the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney has a decided leg up on President Barack Obama.

Newly released figures from Gallup show that the demographics of the American electorate (age, race, sex, etc.) have changed very little since 2008 except in one way:  Party affiliation has swung dramatically toward the Republican party, and away from the Democratic party, during President Obama’s term.

Democratic senator Bob Casey Jr. of Pennsylvania only leads his Republican opponent, Tom Smith, by one point, according to a new poll from Rasmussen.