President Barack Obama earns the support of more than half of likely Virginia voters and leads Mitt Romney by 4 points in the ultra-competitive battleground, according to a poll from the Washington Post released on Saturday night.
The poll shows Obama leading Romney among likely Commonwealth voters 51 percent to 47 percent. That’s narrowly outside of the survey’s margin of error of 3.5 percentage points and a tightening since the previous Washington Post poll of Virginia a month ago, which showed the president leading the Republican nominee 52 percent to 44 percent.
But Saturday’s poll suggests that Obama has weathered a difficult stretch of the campaign and emerged with the lead in Old Dominion, a state where he had been consistently outpolling Romney during the summer months and through September. The poll indicates that the president has maintained his upper hand over Romney in a key policy area and among an important voting bloc in Virginia.
From the Washington Post’s analysis:
Unlike in national polls, Obama still has an edge when Virginia voters are asked who better understands their financial problems, and he has not fallen behind a surging Romney on the question of who would better handle the national economy. Nor has Obama lost significant ground among self-identified independents in Virginia, as he has nationally.
