Polls are all over the place, but this one is getting a lot of attention: a new Time poll finds President Barack Obama has a five point lead over Republican Presidential nominee Mitt Romney — who most analysts believe must win Ohio to win the Presidency:
Buoyed by early voting in his favor, Barack Obama leads Mitt Romney by five points in the pivotal state of Ohio, according to a new TIME poll.
Counting both Ohioans who say they will head to the polls on November 6, and those who have already cast a ballot, Obama holds a 49% to 44% lead over Romney in a survey taken Monday and Tuesday night.
The poll’s margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.
The poll makes clear that there are really two races underway in Ohio. On one hand, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat among Ohioans who have not yet voted but who say they intend to, with 45% of respondents supporting the President and 45% preferring his Republican challenger.
But Obama has clearly received a boost from Ohio’s early voting period, which began on Oct. 2 and runs through November 5. Among respondents who say they have already voted, Obama holds a two-to-one lead over Romney, 60% to 30%.
When those two groups are combined, the TIME poll reveals, Obama leads by five points overall in Ohio.
“At least for the early vote, the Obama ground game seems to be working,” says Mark Schulman, president of Abt SRBI, which conducted the poll.
Nearly one third of all Ohioans voted early in 2008.
The survey also suggests Obama is riding a wave of optimism in Ohio, where voters appear to separate their worries about the direction of the nation from how they regard the landscape in the Buckeye State.
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Expect both candidate to spend a huge amount of time in Ohio, right up to election day.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.