Barack Obama, Battleground State | featured news

President Obama leads Republican nominee Mitt Romney 49% to 45% in the battleground state of Iowa.

A new poll shows President Barack Obama opening a double-digit lead over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in two of the nation's three largest swing states.

The recent shifts in the polls may be less about Mitt Romney than they are about President Obama. We have been documenting for a few days how Obama has consistently risen in polls of swing states — in many of them by several points — to the point where Romney trails basically everywhere that matters.

"If he [Obama] didn't come through and give that vote and say, 'Yes we have got to save Chrysler. We have to save GM. We've got to do this,' all this Sterling Heights would have been gone, would have been dead."

A new Fox News poll shows President Obama leading Mitt Romney in three key states: Ohio, Florida and Virginia. The president leads by 7 percentage points in both Ohio (49%-42%) and Virginia (50%-43%), Fox says. In Florida -- where Obama campaigns today --- he leads Romney, 49%-44%.

The good news for Mitt Romney: He remains within striking distance of President Obama. The bad news: His latest misstep could upend that.

New polls in four battleground states show President Obama holding a lead of 5 to 7 points over Republican nominee Mitt Romney, reinforcing the national surveys that indicate that the incumbent gained ground with his convention last week.

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede. The Romney campaign, while pleasantly surprised by Obama’s lackluster prime-time performance, said the post-convention bounce they hoped for fell well short of expectations and privately lament that state-by-state polling numbers — most glaringly in Ohio — are working in the president’s favor.

Some better poll news for Mitt Romney today, as a new survey puts him in a near-dead heat with President Obama. The president has 48%, while Romney has 47%, well within the margin of error, according to the Politico-George Washington University Battleground Poll.

The battle for presidential votes in the key state of Ohio is heading to court. President Obama's campaign has sued the state of Ohio over new rules for early voting designed to benefit members of the military, saying the extra hours should be available to all voters.