Each of the polls showed the president with a five-point lead, a potentially significant advantage now that the campaign proper has started following the end of the party convention season.
Barack Obama claimed the early momentum in the US presidential election last night (Monday) as he pulled clear of Mitt Romney in three polls and even managed to raise more money than his Republican rival for the first time in months.
Each of the polls showed the president with a five-point lead, a potentially significant advantage now that the campaign proper has started following the end of the party convention season.
Also encouraging for Obama were the latest figures which showed that his campaign raised more money than Romney for the first time since April - raking in $114 million in August, up sharply from $75 million in July.
The Republican challenger also faced claims that he had "flip flopped" over the president's health care reforms after an interview on Sunday in which he suggested he was now in favour of some of its key provisions.
Last night, Romney's camp felt moved to issue a statement urging his supporters not to panic following a disappointing 24 hours. Aides insisted that Obama was merely enjoying a sustained post-convention "sugar high" and that dissatisfaction with the US economy would eventually tell in Romney's favour.
"Don't get too worked up about the latest polling," wrote Neil Newhouse, the Romney campaign's pollster. "While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly."
The Romney campaign, which received a "zero" bounce in the polls after its own convention in Tampa, added that the combination of its superior fund-raising machine and a weak economy with unemployment at 8.1 per cent still put Romney on course to win in November.
"The key numbers in this election are the 43 straight months of 8% or higher unemployment, the 23 million Americans struggling to find work, and the 47 million Americans who are on food stamps," Newhouse added.
Despite Obama delivering a speech that was widely rated as "uninspiring" by many pundits from both sides of the political spectrum, three polls released since the end of the Democratic Convention have shown him four to five points ahead.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday showed Obama leading Romney 43-37%; a Gallup tracking poll put it 49-44; and an automated poll Rasmussen Reports, whose results have favoured Republicans this campaign, put the president 50-45 ahead.
Whit Ayres, an independent Republican pollster, said it was still far too early to read too much into the latest numbers, predicting that all the signs were the race would remain tight until November.
Despite raising $3 million less than the Obama campaign in August, the Romney camp has maintained an overall fund-raising advantage, with an early advertising blitz depleting the Obama coffers while the Romney "war chest" exceeded that of the president by $62million in July.
The Romney camp was accused of flip-flopping after he appeared to promise that he would preserve a popular part of Obama's health care reforms forbidding insurance companies from denying coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses.
But within hours making the promise last Sunday on Meet the Press - America's premiere mass-audience political TV show - Romney's campaign was rowing back on the pledge in statements to Conservative websites.
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