That distinction makes a pivotal difference: Nationwide, political independents focused on a prospective second-term side with Obama over Romney, but those assessing Obama’s first term prefer Romney by more than 20 percentage points. Obama has a 12-point advantage on the question of which candidate has a clearer plan to deal with the country’s economic woes. He has a clear lead over Romney on who has greater empathy for people facing economic problems and on standing up for his beliefs. Even one-third of voters backing Romney consider the president to be the more likable of the two. They are Indiana, where the last survey taken was in March, and North Carolina, where Romney leads the president in the RCP Average, 47.3 percent to 45.3 percent.
– Surprise, surprise: Yet another poll, this one by the Washington Post, shows the presidential race to be a statistical dead heat. What about an electoral dead heat? Real Clear Politics crunches the numbers and comes up with several ways that Mitt Romney and President Obama could be tied at 269 electoral votes apiece after the polls close, a result that would require the House to decide the next president. One example, which Erin McPike at RCP calls the most likely way for a tie to happen: Romney claims all of John McCain's states, along with Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, and New Hampshire. But he loses one electoral vote to Obama in Nebraska because of that state's "anomalous way" of allocating its five votes. Voila: 269-269. There are several other ways, or combinations thereof, that yield the same result, "and given shifting dynamics and poll numbers, they aren't as unlikely as one might think," adds McPike.