Republican candidate Mitt Romney leads the final Gallup poll of the 2012 campaign, clinging to a 1-point edge.
Romney sees 49 percent of likely voters nationally, while President Obama gets 48 percent, according to Monday’s poll. Other national polls released over the last 24 hours have been extremely tight with a slight edge toward the president — Pew Research showed Obama up 3 points nationally, NBC News and the Wall Street Journal found a 1-point Obama edge, while CNN and Monmouth University polls found the race tied.
Now Gallup shows Romney with a slight advantage, and it all adds up to a dead heat nationally. The PollTracker Average of all nationwide surveys shows the president with a slight advantage before tomorrow’s vote.
“The race is not only close overall, but has Romney and Obama holding equally strong advantages among men and women, respectively, and closely matched among political independents,” Gallup pollsters wrote in an analysis. “This suggests that turnout of partisans could be particularly important in deciding the election, with Romney poised to benefit slightly more if they do, with 96% of Republicans backing him, as compared with Obama’s 93% support from Democrats.”
Gallup suspended its national tracking poll on Oct. 29 because of Hurricane Sandy, but Romney had been performing well before that. He led the Gallup tracker by between 3 and 6 points among likely voters from Oct. 16th until the suspension.
But the candidates are accumulating more previously undecided voters as we approach Election Day, with Obama now moving up to a total of 48.9 percent and Romney at 47.9 percent in the PollTracker Average. And the the sum totals themselves have indicated more and more voters making up their minds — the latest round of national polls are only showing 3-4 percent of voters choosing another candidate or still undecided.
The Gallup poll used 2,551 live telephone interviews with likely voters via landline and cell-phone conducted Nov. 1-4. It has a sampling error of 2 percent.
Kyle Leighton
Kyle is the Editor of TPM Media’s PollTracker. He graduated from Beloit College (WI) and began working in politics before getting an M.A. in magazine journalism from New York University, where he interned at TPM and the website of The New Yorker.
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