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Washington: As America began voting Tuesday at the
end of a gruelling, expensive campaign, President Barack Obama
appeared to have a slight edge over Republican challenger Mitt
Romney in the battleground states in what by all accounts is
expected to be a cliffhanger.
The first daylight polls opened in Vermont, kicking off voting
across the eastern US and parts of the Midwest as dawn broke.
Several locations in Vermont opened their polls as early as at 5
a.m., while most opened an hour later.
At least 120 million Americans are expected to vote on giving
Obama a second term or replacing him with Romney.
Taking no chances, both Obama and Romney and their key campaigners
spent the final hours leading to Tuesday' poll dashing across
electoral battlegrounds in Florida, Nevada, Colorado, Ohio,
Wisconsin, Iowa, Virginia and New Hampshire.
Romney, according to a campaign official, will keep campaigning on
Election Day, adding stops in Democratic-heavy Cleveland and
Pittsburgh.
Seven of the eight national polls released since Sunday indicate
the race for the White House is not only in a dead heat
nationally, but also in the key battleground states that will
decide the next tenant of the White House, according to CNN.
According to the final CNN/ORC International poll released Sunday
night, 49 percent of likely voters support the president, with an
equal number backing the former Massachusetts governor.
A Politico/George Washington University survey has the race tied
at 48 percent. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll indicates
Obama at 48 percent and Romney at 47 percent.
The latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll puts Obama at 49
percent and Romney at 48 percent; Gallup's latest daily tracking
poll had Romney at 49 percent and Obama at 48 percent.
American Research Group had it deadlocked at 49 percent and
Monmouth University had it all tied up at 48 percent. A Pew
Research Centre survey released Sunday indicates the president at
50 percent and the challenger at 47 percent, which is within the
survey's sampling error.
However, despite the close polls nationally, looking at the polls
in key battleground states many analysts give Obama better odds to
reach the magic number of 270 in the 538-member Electoral College.
FiveThirtyEight, a respected blog run on the New York Times by a
former baseball statistician Nate Silver, for one, upped Obama's
share by eight points to 314.4, giving him a 91.4 percent chance
of victory with a 50.9 percent vote to Romney's 48.2 percent.
"If President Obama wins re-election on Tuesday, the historical
memory of the race might turn on the role played by Hurricane
Sandy," he said, calling it an "October surprise" that allowed
Obama to regain his footing after stumbling in the first
presidential debate.
"Obama led in the vast majority of battleground-state polls over
the weekend. And increasingly, it is hard to find leads for Romney
in national surveys - although several of them show a tie," Silver
wrote.
Politico, another influential site that focuses on presidential
politics, too raised Obama's Electoral College share to 303
including 66 swing state votes from 290 Sunday.
The Real Clear Politics, a political news aggregating side, also
increased Obama's average advantage by a point to 48.8 percent,
just 0.7 percentage points ahead of Romney. But it stuck to its
forecast of 206 votes for Obama to Romney's 191 with 146 too close
to call.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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