Polls find Obama with edge in Wis., NH, Iowa; Romney up in Colo.

The latest round of swing-state polls released Thursday show small leads for President Obama in crucial battlegrounds including Wisconsin, New Hampshire and Iowa, and GOP nominee Mitt Romney ahead in Colorado.

Polls show the race in Wisconsin has tightened in recent days, with a new survey from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal giving the president a 3-point lead in Wisconsin. A Wisconsin poll from Rasmussen Reports calls the state a 49-49 percent tie. Those numbers represent a 3-point loss for the president from mid-October in the NBC poll, although his standing in the traditionally conservative-leaning Rasmussen survey has remained steady from last week.

Both campaigns are making a strong push to capture the key battleground in the closing days of the race, with GOP vice presidential candidate and Wisconsin native Rep. Paul Ryan (R) spending the past two days there. Green Bay will also be the site of the president’s first official campaign trip since Hurricane Sandy.

{mosads}Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes are considered a vital part of the president’s Midwestern firewall, and if Romney were able to break through in the state, his paths to reaching the requisite 270 electoral votes to win the White House would increase exponentially.

The president was faring slightly better in Iowa, where the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll gave him a 6-point edge. Half of all likely voters surveyed in the Hawkeye State said they would support the president, versus 44 percent who chose Romney.

Again, the poll represented a slight slip for the president, who had been leading the same poll by 8 points in mid-October.

The WSJ/NBC poll also found the president with a 49-47 percent lead in New Hampshire. While the news organizations have not polled Granite State voters since September, those figures are in line with surveys from Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP) and New England College released earlier this week that suggest Romney is within striking distance in the state.

The Obama campaign was also buoyed by a Las Vegas Review Journal poll showing him expanding his lead in Nevada with 50 percent support to Romney’s 46. An Review Journal poll in mid-October showed Obama up 3, at 48-45. 

The Republican presidential nominee’s most encouraging news came from the Rasmussen survey of Colorado, which gave Romney a 50-47 percent lead there. That’s a positive sign for Romney, who will likely need Colorado to anchor a sweep of many of the battleground states if he hopes to win the White House in next week’s election, and particularly encouraging considering the president won the state by 9 points in 2008.

Still, the Rasmussen survey was somewhat offset by a WeAskAmerica poll, also released Thursday, that gave the president an identical 50-47 percent lead. The WeAskAmerica poll was conducted a day after the Rasmussen survey and carried a sample more than twice the size of Rasmussen’s poll, giving Team Obama reason of its own to feel confident about Colorado.

The WSJ/NBC polls were conducted from Oct. 28-29 and have a 3-point margin of error. The Las Vegas Review Journal poll was conducted from Oct. 23 to 26 and has a 3-point margin of error. The We Ask America Colorado poll was conducted on Oct. 30 and has a 3-point margin of error.