Polls: 5 days away

With less than a week before Election Day, polls released Thursday indicated a narrow edge for President Barack Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, three states that are being fiercely contested in the final stretch of the campaign.

In Iowa, Obama was at 50% among likely voters, and Romney at 44%, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll. That's slightly tighter than earlier in October, though the result Thursday was just outside the poll's sampling error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points. A poll released Wednesday indicated...

The countdown to Election Day continues, and the pace of polling in the battleground states has increased. But the main findings remain unchanged: Though polls show an essentially tied race between President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney nationwide, Obama holds narrow leads in a handful of battleground states that appear poised to decide the election.

With just five days remaining, the most crucial question now may be less about last-minute polling trends and more about whether the polls will prove to be collectively accurate.