The Wall Street Journal, NBC News and Marist College produce the umpteenth poll of the week showing Barack Obama with a steady edge in Ohio and a very close race in Florida: The surveys found the two battling neck-and-neck in Florida, with Mr. Obama drawing 49% support among likely voters to Mr. Romney's 47%.
Mr. Obama held a firmer lead in Ohio—51% to 45%, unchanged from mid-October—where the relatively more buoyant economy and the federal bailout of the auto industry appear to have solidified his support among a wide swath of voters.
In both states, Mr. Obama got high marks from all sides for his management of recovery efforts after the storm Sandy hit the East Coast. That tracks an array of polls taken in the past week suggesting that Mr. Romney's rise may have flattened out just before Sandy landed, an event that sucked national attention away from the campaign trail. In the Florida and Ohio polls, even a majority of Republican voters approved of Mr. Obama's handling of the storm's aftermath.
The Florida result is significantly different from the Miami Herald poll published earlier tonight, but it's in line with the bulk of public polling showing a narrowly divided state. The Journal highlights the stability of Obama's performance in Ohio, where he fares better with whites than he does nationally, and where "little changed in [the electorate's] views in recent weeks."
Romney launched his final weekend of campaigning in Ohio tonight and evidently needs a last-minute boost to overcome a pretty stable Obama lead.
