Polls tied as White House rivals have final face-off

President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney were tied at 47% support each among likely voters ahead of their final live presidential debate in the early hours of this morning.

With just over two weeks to go before the US presidential election, the NBC/Wall Street Journal nationwide poll, conducted after last Monday’s presidential debate, reinforced the perception of the race as a cliffhanger.

It showed “a little bit of a lead” for Romney among the critical “battleground” states as a group, NBC correspondent Chuck Todd said.

Among a larger sample of registered voters, Obama led Romney 49% to 44%, the Wall Street Journal said in a report on the poll on its website.

This however, was down from a seven-point edge the president had among registered voters in late September, the Journal said.

“Sitting at 47% is a good number for a challenger, but not a good number for an incumbent” close to the Nov 6 election, NBC’s Todd said on Meet the Press. He said Obama’s lead among women — 51% to 43% — was his smallest all year long.

Obama’s campaign adviser David Axelrod said polls for the election were “all over the map”. He said he had always predicted Obama’s re-election attempt would be close.

“If you look at the early voting that’s going on around the country, it’s very robust and its very favourable to us. And we think that’s a better indicator than these public polls, which are frankly all all over the map,” Axelrod said.

Ohio Senator Rob Portman, a Republican who helped Romney prepare for his campaign debates, said: “I like what I see because the trend is in our direction,” he said.

Romney has been closing in on Obama in recent weeks, with several surveys showing the pair tied or close to it, as Americans remain split between giving Obama more time to fix the economy, or choosing a former business executive who argues he knows best how to create jobs.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll at the weekend showed Obama with a razor-thin lead, 46% to 45%. The margin had narrowed from Friday when he had a three-point lead. After the third and final presidential debate aired early this morning, Obama was to travel to battleground states Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Virginia and Ohio to try to fend off Romney’s challenge.

Obama and Romney tangled over foreign policy in their final presidential debate with both men still looking for a breakout from a deadlocked White House campaign.

The former Massachusetts governor has been hitting Obama hard on the administration’s changing explanations of what happened in last month’s attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where militants killed four Americans, including US ambassador Chris Stevens.