Who Will Win The 2012 Presidential Election

It was official: with President Barack Obama's acceptance speech in Charlotte on Thursday night, both parties had chosen their nominees for the 2012 presidential election. Let the real race begin.

Going into the conventions, the race was essentially tied. Gallup's seven-day rolling average of registered voters had shown Obama at 47 percent and Romney at 46 percent every day since August 29 — a slight shift toward Obama, since Romney had held a consistent two-point advantage in mid-August after naming Paul Ryan as his running mate. It was the longest period in Gallup's daily tracking showing Romney with any edge at all.

The conventions told two different stories. Mitt Romney got no bounce from the Republican convention in Tampa — Gallup's post-convention tracking had him at 46 percent, essentially unchanged from before, and his acceptance speech got the lowest marks of any since 1996. He became only the third recent nominee (and the first Republican) to get no convention bounce. Meanwhile, the Democratic convention in Charlotte gave Obama a preliminary bounce: by Friday, September 7, his approval rating hit 52 percent — its highest since the bin Laden killing in May 2011 — and his ballot lead stretched to 48-45.

A pre-convention USA Today/Gallup poll had captured the race's central tension: voters thought Obama more likeable, but trusted Romney more to handle the economy. That split was the whole election in miniature.

So who would win? With two months to go, the honest answer was: nobody knew. Gaffes, scandals, debates, or international events could shift everything. Pundits were handicapping incumbent advantage, fundraising, and religion for all they were worth.

The race ran through three debates, a "47 percent" video that damaged Romney, and Hurricane Sandy's late-October arrival — and on November 6, Obama won decisively in the Electoral College, 332 to 206. The polls, as it turned out, were telling the truth: a narrow but real Obama advantage, widened at the finish.