Obama 43%, Romney 41%

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney remains neck-and-neck with President Obama in the latest hypothetical Election 2012 matchup.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. voters finds Obama with 43% of the vote to Romney’s 41%. Ten percent (10%) prefer some other candidate, while six percent (6%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
 

Obama and Romney have been virtually tied for several weeks.  Romney has consistently been the Republican hopeful who runs most competitively with the president, but Georgia businessman Herman Cain who appears to be surging in the GOP race has pulled within three points of Obama - 42% to 39%.

Interestingly, the president earns support in the low to mid-40s against virtually all the top Republican contenders, suggesting that the race remains a referendum on his performance in office. Obama's Presidential Job Approval Index rating for September remained at an all-time low of -21.  Aside from the past two-months, the president’s approval index rating has stayed between -11 and -17 since the beginning of 2010. 

A generic Republican candidate has now led the president by single digits in weekly polling for nearly three months.  Rasmussen Reports will update that number today at 3 p.m. Eastern. The president’s Job Approval rating is updated daily.

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on October 8-9, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.