Battleground Poll - October 17, 2012

Likely Voter, 1000 sample size, Obama leads 49-48, 3% undecided.

This poll is essentially unchanged since the last time it was conducted, proving that the shift of voters to Romney from the first debate was significant and lasting.  With 2 weeks for the voters to "set their opinions in concrete" getting them to move back to Obama is a difficult challenge.  As I've mentioned before, this poll undersamples independents by pushing them to self identify as leaning in one direction or another.  Since Independents favor Romney by 8 points in this poll, that skews the D+4 poll even further toward Obama.  The D/R/I of this poll is 44/40/18.

One very important point.  The last time this poll was run, Independents favored Romney by 16 points, now it is 8 points.  However, the relative level of support for both candidates in the reweights does not change much from the last time. This indicates that Romney's support is firming up.  Here are the results from the turnout models:

O+1 - Current result
O+1.0 - 2008 turnout
R+1.2 - D+3 turnout
R+3.1 - 2010 turnout
R+3.1 - 2004 turnout
R+4.5 - Rasmussen Party ID

Note that even with the D+3 turnout model, Romney leads in this poll by a decent amount.