Presidential Polls 2012: Obama's Battleground Advantage Holds

WASHINGTON -- The veritable fire hose of data turned on in the final days of the 2012 campaign leaves little doubt that while the national popular vote remains too close to call, President Barack Obama holds slim but meaningful leads over Republican nominee Mitt Romney in the battleground states that will likely decide the presidential election.
With just three days remaining before votes are counted, most of the national tracking polls continue to show a basically deadlocked race, with six new surveys released in the last 24 hours showing roughly the same findings as those from earlier in the week.

In nominal terms, most polls now show either a tie or a slim Obama edge, but the differences between Obama and Romney in any one poll are too small to be considered statistically significant.
The HuffPost Pollster tracking model, which uses data at the national and state levels to produce estimates of the combined polling snapshots, continues to show a national deadlock. However, for the first time in two weeks, Obama's percentage of the national popular vote was just slightly higher than Romney's, according to the tracking model (47.4 to 47.2 percent, as of this writing).
But even when all of the national polling data is combined, neither Friday's uptick for Obama nor the razor-thin margin separating the candidates nationwide is statistically significant. In plain English -- as of this writing, the polls collectively tell us that the national popular vote is just too close to call.
The snapshot is different, however, within the battleground states that will likely decide the outcome of the election