Like Blumenthal, Silver suspects Romney's momentum has stopped:
This is the closest that we’ve come in a week or so to one candidate clearly having "won" the day in the tracking polls — and it was Mr. Obama.
The trend could also be spurious. If the race is steady, it’s not that hard for one candidate to gain ground in five of six polls (excluding the two that showed no movement on Wednesday) just based on chance alone. What isn’t very likely, however, is for one candidate to lose ground in five of six polls if the race is still moving toward him. In other words, we can debate whether Mr. Obama has a pinch of momentum or whether the race is instead flat, but it’s improbable that Mr. Romney would have a day like this if he still had momentum.
Sabato's view:
We just have not seen indications as of yet that Obama has lost his small lead in the Buckeye State, although Romney is clearly doing better than he was before the first debate. We’re always looking for parallels to previous elections, so how about this one: 1976. That year, Jimmy Carter built a big lead over incumbent President Gerald Ford — much bigger than Obama’s pre-debate edge — only to see that lead slip away during the campaign. That year, Carter won Ohio by less than three-tenths of a percentage point, while a liberal Senate candidate, Democrat Howard Metzenbaum, defeated Republican Sen. Robert Taft by three points. Given that a liberal senator in Metzenbaum’s mold, Democrat Sherrod Brown, looks likely to run ahead of his party’s presidential candidate, it wouldn’t surprise us if we saw a similar outcome this year. The truth is that the Midwestern battlegrounds of Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin could still go either way.
Nate Cohn weighs in:
Perhaps the best news for Romney is that Obama is still beneath 49 percent in the Buckeye State, where Obama is swimming upstream against a traditional Republican-lean and unfavorable demographics. But even if Romney has a path to victory in Ohio, he's starting to run out of time. Every day without a shift in Ohio, Wisconsin, or Nevada is a day lost in his pursuit of the presidency.
The Dish 