New US polls make forecast even harder Two new and respected polls in battleground states on Thursday showed one clear trend: the US presidential race is becoming increasingly hard to call. There are also, according to one of the polls, two themes at work on public opinion, a strengthening of the personal appeal of Mitt Romney as a leader and a strengthening of the US economy, that are balancing each other out overall. But while it is apparent that the race is tightening into one which may be as close as the 2000 election, which took 36 days after voting day to declare a result, the runes remain hard to read. For instance, while the CBS/New York Times/Quinnipiac College poll for Virginia shows President Barack Obama with a lead of 5 percentage points, 51:46, the NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll gives Mr Romney a 1 per cent lead in the same state. They have a margin of error of about 3.0 and 3.1 per cent, respectively. In other swing states, the Quinnipiac poll gives the president a 3-point lead in Wisconsin, 2 points in Michigan and 8 in Pennsylvania. He is trailing his Republican opponent in Colorado by 1 point. The Marist poll says Mr Romney and Mr Obama are only separated by 1 point in Florida, the same score as a week ago, before the debate in Denver which was seen to have been won clearly by the challenger. The weighted average of recent polling, compiled by the website RealClearPolitics.com, shows both candidates at 47.5 per cent of the vote. There is, statistically speaking, no margin of error in this long-term polling average. Veterans of the 36-day debacle in Florida 12 years ago, when election officials pored over voting cards with magnifying glasses to define whether they had been cleanly punched through or merely had "dimpled chads," will shudder at the thought of a tied poll in Florida. The detail of the Quinnipiac poll shows that good unemployment figures released last Friday, showing the headline rate falling to 7.8 per cent, have persuaded potential voters that the US economy may be at the beginning of recovery. Some 37 per cent of voters in Colorado agreed that the economy was improving, compared with 26 per cent when the same question was asked in July. The figure for Virginia voters was 42 per cent, up by 18 percentage points over three months.