Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney leads President Obama by 4 points in a Gallup poll of 12 swing states released Monday. The poll was commissed by USA Today. Romney gets 50 percent of likely voters and Obama sees 46 percent support in a combined sample of voters in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
“In every poll, we’ve seen a major surge among women in favorability for Romney,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told the paper about the race after the first presidential debate. “Women went into the debate actively disliking Romney, and they came out thinking he might understand their lives and might be able to get something done for them.”
In the Gallup poll Romney gets a 54 percent majority of men, while Obama takes 42 percent. The two candidates split women evenly, both earning 48 percent.
Update, 4:22: President Obama’s campaign pollster Joel Benenson sent a memo to reporters pushing back against the numbers, based mostly in Gallup’s likely voter screen and arguing the poll is particularly out of step with other surveys. “In the past, Gallup’s justification for such outlying numbers is that they are providing a snapshot of voter attitudes during a particular time period, not predicting the outcome of the election,” Benenson wrote. “But this implausible result among women appears to not even provide an accurate reflection on the electorate today, making its value questionable.”
Update, 6:59: USA Today noted the following correction (dropping Romney’s lead from 5 points to 4 points), and TPM updated our story as such — “Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described Romney’s lead over Obama among likely voters in swing states due to an editing error.”
