Depends on which polling you choose to believe. PPP is a decidedly Left leaning polling organization and the fact Obama is not ahead in States he won last year is a very bad sign for him. He is a known quantity now and there are very few undecideds for him to grab. If as likely voter polls show currently Romney is ahead by double digits among Independents and this lead holds he will win and win fairly handily.
Everyone has some relationship somewhere ~ job, business, profession, social class, geographic area, city, town, county, township, watershed area, climate, appetite, religion, blood relatives, etc.
Each and every one of those relationships by itself is a more powerful indicator of how you'll vote, if you do vote, than a self-appellation of 'independent'.
An 'independent' as defined by the pollsters is someone not registered or otherwise affiliated with a particular political party ~
Still, in our system of single member districts with it's winner take all vote counting, it takes a consistent pattern of getting 50%+1 vote to win. Then your candidates won't lose, and mind you, not everybody can be a candidate, so the regularity of winning depends on coming up with winning candidates who represent the FACTIONS within that particular political coalition.
The losers also have to play the same game. They cannot improve their position by competing with each other, so they have to form another coalition that goes for that 50%+1 vote ~ and they may well try to bust loose one of the factions in the previous winning coalitions (by offering a better deal).
Independents are necessarily OUTSIDE the political machinery of the two major coalitions mathematically possible in our system. On the other hand the politics of the coalition members ~ those other relationships of job, business, profession, social class, geographic area, city, town, county, township, watershed area, climate, appetite, religion, age cohort, blood relatives, etc., ~ continue to be in play.
We can ask people if they are a Republican or a Democrat with some reliability, but you can't just ask them if they are an Independent without also knowing those other far more relevant relationships.
Let's say you were doing a phone sample and you got Mayor Bloomburg on the line. So, you ask him if he's a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent. On any given day he might well say "any of those" ~ !
Obviously he doesn't fit the standard pigeon holes. But if you asked him if he were Middle Aged, member of an important synagogue, church or temple, loved liberal nostrums and hated salt, that would be far more relevant than almost anything else you could find out. In NYC and parts of Connecticut knowing those things ~ not whether he were Independent, Republican or Democrat, would provide you with a much better sampling cell that could provide understandable results.
Or, we could ask him if he had ever been elected to public office ~ and that would prove that even if he said he was an Independent you would know he wasn't actually "Independent'.
Back in Junior HIgh we were introduced to the mathematical concept called the 'Egyptian Variable'. It's the number you use to multiply your answer by to come up with the correct answer. That's exactly what this Independent category does. The pollster can increase or decrease the number of independent voters she says she polled to provide a number her client (all polls are paid for by someone eh) feels is OK.
BTW, you can't just dump the Independent category from any poll that reports on this fictional element ~ else, in most cases, you'll find yourself looking at densities of Democrat and Republican respondents that are insufficient to draw the conclusions you'd like to draw.
Which means it's not a question of which polling I chose to believe, but more like WHAT HAPPENED LAST TIME, and LAST TIME Obama got 10 million more votes than John McCain.
Polling that focuses on major party coalition partners to detect changes in affinity would make some sense. So, how are those wealthy business people who financed Obama thinking? Are they dumping him? Are they perhaps attacking others in their faction for straying from the "Interest group" plantation?
Not that any of those people are going to give any pollster an honest response you can look at the FEC reports to see where they're putting their money. You can read the NYT to find the gossip!
That's also 'Polling' but of a different sort ~ but at this stage of the game it's probably the only polling that counts.