More mixed messages in national polls today.
Republican challenger Mitt Romney's much-touted lead in the Gallup daily tracking poll shrank by 2 points. He now leads President Obama by 3 points, down from a high of 7 points earlier this week.
However, that lead is still outside the 2-point margin of error.
Romney maintained his lead in the Rasmussen daily tracking poll, holding at 4 points above Obama.
And the IDB/TIPP daily poll has Obama up by 3 points, a 1-point increase in his lead from yesterday.
Remember that all three of these polls use rolling averages, that is, they aggregate data from the last week, in the case of the Gallup and IBD polls, and the last three days in the case of the Rasmussen poll.
That means they are slower to respond to recent changes in public sentiment. If the Gallup poll shows an increase in support for Obama, the data gathered yesterday must show him with an even larger increase, to counter the extra weight of Romney's good numbers over the last week.
An ABC/Washington Post poll from late Tuesday gives Romney a 1-point lead, the first time that poll has shown the Republican winning.
So what does all this disparate information mean?
Yesterday, it looked like most of the national polls were moving closer to consensus, regressing towards the mean. Today, they're moving in opposite directions.
While it may just be statistical noise, most of the polls show a tightening of the race. The ABC/Post poll is the outlier, and all of its data is from before the final presidential debate on Monday.
That doesn't mean that we can discount it, but it does make its results circumspect, at least as representative of current public sentiment.
The Gallup and IBD polls still have about five days worth of pre-debate data in their averages, while the Rasmussen poll has between one and two.
Rasmussen should be totally post-debate by Friday, but Gallup and IBD won't be rid of their pre-debate data until next week, just one week before Election Day.
So we need some other data to help figure out the trend.
Well, state polls are coming in all the time, and the latest ones show small improvements in Obama's standing.
That matches up with this writer's prediction that we'd see a slight bounce in the post-debate polls for Obama.
We'll have definite data in a few days, but until then, It looks like Obama is erasing Romney's edge. What will happen after that remains to be seen.
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