Though likely voters give broadly positive ratings to President Obama’s response to the devastating hurricane, the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll finds essentially no change: Likely voters are back to exactly an even split in preferences, 49% to 49%, between Obama and Mitt Romney – within a point or two of where the race has been all along.

Key finding: 78% rate Obama’s response to the hurricane positively (as excellent or good), while just 8% see it negatively.

A new Fox News poll also shows the race tied at 46%.

However, a new National Journal poll shows Obama surging into a five point lead, 50% to 45%.

Richard Tisei (R), who is challenging Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) for a U.S. House seat, has released a new ad that is just video of the waves along the Massachusetts coast.

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A new Pew Research survey finds the presidential candidates are running about even when it comes to the ground game.

“Voters nationally, as well those in the closely contested battleground states, report being contacted at about the same rates by each of the campaigns. And with a fifth of likely voters reporting already having cast their ballots, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney has a clear advantage among early voters. This is in sharp contrast to early voting at this point four years ago, which favored Obama by a wide margin.”

“His entire strategy is to blame others – starting with my brother, of
course. Basically, he blames every possible thing rather
than having the humility to be able to reach out and to find common
ground.”

— Jeb Bush, quoted by Politico, criticizing President Obama.

Obama campaign manager Jim Messina shut the door on that possibility that they would win Arizona, though he called it an “enticing prospect,” reports Politico.

Said Messina: “Our map is set, unlike the Romney campaign, which is flailing, trying to make the map different than it is. I believe on the ground we continue to show real enthusiasm to get to 270 electoral votes in all these battleground states. We understand the several maps we need to get there.”

“After it’s all over, when your insurance rates go down, then you’ll vote for me in 2016.”

— Vice President Joe Biden, quoted by The Hill, chatting by phone with a Republican voter.

A new Gallup poll finds a majority of Americans continue to believe that President Obama will win re-election Tuesday over Mitt Romney, by 54% to 34%.

Nate Cohn: “Absent a possible but unlikely last-minute shift in the polls between now and Election Day, Romney’s chances will come down to the low but existent risk that the polls are and have been completely wrong. As Senators Harry Reid and Michael Bennet can attest, the polls have been wrong before and could be wrong again. But the Romney campaign’s revival of August’s welfare attack and their recent Jeep outsourcing antics suggest that Boston’s numbers don’t show something too different, while Chicago has unwaveringly maintained that they hold a modest and clear lead in Ohio. With Obama near 49 percent and just six days to go before the polls close, Romney’s window for a comeback is getting vanishingly narrow.”

David Axelrod is confident that president Obama’s reelection chances aren’t in danger in Michigan, Minnesota or Pennsylvania, despite tightening polls there, the Washington Post reports.

Said Axelrod: “I will come on ‘Morning Joe,’ and I will shave off my mustache of 40 years if we lose any of those three states.”

With less than a week to go, Jonathan Martin notes the two presidential campaigns have two very different perspectives of the election.

“The Mitt Romney narrative: The electoral map is expanding and we are on the march. Minnesota and Pennsylvania — blue states that neither campaign had been paying attention to — are tightening and if such patterns hold up, we could win a smashing victory with over 300 electoral votes.”

“The Barack Obama side: There they go again. This is 2008 in replay mode, when John McCain had no path to 270 electoral votes and made a desperate gambit to try and put Pennsylvania in play. Romney needs to project Big Mo to paper over his struggles in the core battleground states. Nice head fake Mitt — but we don’t buy it.”

A memo obtained by NewsChannel5 from a Republican adviser in West Palm Beach, Florida says that the Democratic turnout effort is “cleaning our clock.”

The memo says, “The early and absentee turnout is starting to look more troubling.”

First Read: “Given how close this election is, it won’t be surprising if the losing side ends up blaming Sandy, whether it’s fair or not. You could argue that Sandy has both elevated the president and stopped the momentum narrative for Romney. But you could also contend that Sandy has kept the president off the campaign trail for at least three days. Just like Kerry partisans blamed bin Laden video in ’04, Bush folks blamed the DUI story in ’00 and McCain folks blamed Lehman collapse in ’08, Sandy will get the blame from the losing side, period.”

McCay Coppins reports the last-minute decision by Romney high command to suspend politics while Hurricane Sandy raged sent aides in Ohio scrambling to convert a scheduled victory rally into an apolitical “storm relief event.”

“But the last-minute nature of the call for donations left some in the campaign concerned that they would end up with an empty truck. So the night before the event, campaign aides went to a local Wal Mart and spent $5,000 on granola bars, canned food, and diapers to put on display while they waited for donations to come in, according to one staffer. (The campaign confirmed that it ‘did donate supplies to the relief effort,’ but would not specify how much it spent.)”

Charlie Cook notes that Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, “which once looked like they were slipping more into the Romney orbit, have pulled back to essentially even-money contests.”

The Fix: “That conventional wisdom has led many… to conclude that Ohio is now the single most important state in the country when it comes to Mitt Romney’s electoral math. But, without Florida and Virginia, Romney may never get to the point, electorally speaking, where Ohio becomes makes or break.”

“This president is either engaged in a massive cover-up deceiving the American people or he is so grossly incompetent that he is not qualified to be the commander in chief of our armed forces. It’s either one of them.”

— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), quoted by NBC News, politicizing a storm relief event in Ohio.

Washington Post: “For a day at least, Hurricane Sandy appears to have done for President Obama what he has not been able to do for himself.”

“In a campaign notable mostly for its negativity, the historic storm provided Obama with a commander-in-chief moment a week before Election Day. The president gained a rare moment of bipartisan praise, with Democratic and Republican governors alike commending the performance of the federal government. And the storm put on pause, for now, the sense that rival Mitt Romney had all the momentum in the home stretch.”

AP: “The politics of Obama’s storm response are not overt. The point is to
go the other direction and just be presidential. So gone, for three days
and counting, are the rallies in which Obama expressly asks people to
re-elect him. Instead, voters see images of Obama in charge in the
Situation Room, or addressing the country from the White House briefing
room, or assuring the hurting while visiting the American Red Cross that
‘America is with you.’ To the independent and undecided voters sick of
the mess in Washington, Obama appears bipartisan and positively
unconcerned about his own political fate.”

Mitt Romney refused to answer questions about how he would handle the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), after a Tuesday “storm relief” event in Ohio for Hurricane Sandy, the Huffington Post reports.

From the Romney pool report: “TV pool asked Romney at least five times whether he would eliminate FEMA as president/what he would do with FEMA. He ignored the qs but they are audible on cam. The music stopped at points and the qs would have been audible to him.”

“We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”

— GM spokesman Greg Martin, quoted by the Detroit Free Press, on Mitt Romney’s latest ad in Ohio.