Gallup's daily presidential tracker has settled back into a dead heat -- with a single, statistically insignificant point separating Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Rasmussen's tracker wiped the post-DNC bounce away late last week. (Rasmussen tracks likely voters and refreshes its numbers on a three-day cycle; Gallup measures registered voters across seven-day cycles). So where do things stand today? Almost precisely where they did before the conventions shook things up. Obama led by as many as five points in Rasmussen and seven points in Gallup in the wake of his convention, thanks largely to an effective speech from former President Clinton. Today, Romney leads Obama by two points in the former poll, while Obama holds a single-point edge in the latter. For what it's worth, this is the exact dynamic predicted by the Weekly Standard's Jay Cost more than a week ago. I'll leave you with a few pieces of new battleground state data:
(1) Romney pulls into a virtual tie among registered New Hampshire voters. The good news for Republicans is that a likely voter screen would probably boost Mitt a little bit. The bad news is that the sample looks slightly too favorable to the GOP, although undeclared voters dominate the pool of respondents.
(2) Romney edges into the lead in Colorado. Other recent polls have shown Obama up by one, two and five points there. The last survey on that list was conducted by a Democrat firm. As I reported earlier, the Romney campaign believes this state is a pure toss-up right now.
(3) A Washington Post poll says Obama is leading Romney by eight points in Virginia. The survey relies on a D+9 sample, three points higher than than 2008's partisan split. Politico's Jonathan Martin is rather skeptical. Rasmussen recently pegged the Virginia race at 49-48 in Obama's favor. Other polls have it somewhere in between.
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