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Raleigh pollster Tom Jensen landed on Business Insider magazine's list of the 36 most powerful people in politics, joining the likes of Bill Clinton, Chris Christie, Michelle Obama and Karl Rove.

Jensen, a Chapel Hill resident, is the chief pollster at Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm that does automated polling. Business Insider writes: "Largely unknown prior to the 2012 campaign, Jensen's North Carolina-based firm ended up being the most reliable public pollster of the election. The firm correctly predicted the winner of the presidential race in all 50 states, and at the end of the election, PPP was rated as the most accurate polling company of the campaign.

A new poll shows President Barack Obama leads Republican Mitt Romney in North Carolina by four points -- the third survey in a week to give the Democrat the slight edge.

The National Research poll conducted for the conservative Civitas Institute gives Obama 49 percent to Romney's 45 percent. With Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson in the survey, the margin remains: Obama at 47 percent to Romney's 43 percent. Johnson received 4 percent.

The poll's four-point margin of error shows the race is still close. Two other polls released last week -- from High Point University and Purple Polls -- gave Obama a slight advantage but also within the margins. The National Research poll was conducted Sept. 18-19 and reached 600 likely voters.

A second new poll shows North Carolina a dead heat in the presidential contest.

President Barack Obama has a 48 to 46 percent lead over his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney in North Carolina, with 6 percent of the voters not sure, according to The PurplePoll. The results were were within the poll's 4 percent margin of error.

The PurplePoll is a bipartisan poll conducted in a dozen swing states likely to determine the election by two well-known Republican and Democratic firms, National Media an Issue & Image. The principles include Republican Alex Castellanos and Democrat Jim Jordan, both North Carolinians.

As North Carolina slowly wakes up from the Great Recession, unemployment is stubbornly high at 9.6 percent, income levels are down and the poverty rate has spiked since 2000. Some are asking the inevitable question: Have we slipped?

The debate is under way in every corner of the state as election season builds to a conclusion. It is central in the campaign for governor. Read the full story and see how N.C. ranks.

More political headlines:

--Not all polls are created equal. Jim Morrill breaks the numbers down.

Neil Newhouse, the pollster for the Romney campaign, issued a memo Monday predicting that the "Obama campaign is laying the groundwork for a stealth withdrawal."

Newhouse's spin: In a state the President won by a mere 14,000 votes in 2008, all one has to do is look at the Obama campaign’s television buy in the state to understand how they view their chances there.  The Obama campaign’s North Carolina television buy has dropped 35% compared to June, and they have run more than twice as much advertising over the past two weeks in Rochester, Minnesota (hitting a small slice of Iowa), than they have in any North Carolina market.

Updated: The conservative Civitas Institute released a poll Friday showing Republican Pat McCrory with a 16-point lead against rival Walter Dalton, though the sample appears skewed in McCrory's favor.

The poll shows McCrory getting 31 percent of the black vote, which strategists believe is unlikely.

Civitas released only a few poll questions and no numbers about the sample or methodology. The robo-poll was conducted Sept. 4-6 by contacting 500 registered voters. It's margin of error is 4.5 percent.

With CNN's poll showing that Mitt Romney has lost some support in North Carolina, the cable TV network moved the state from “lean Romney” to “toss up.”

The poll results were released Monday, showing 48 percent of likely voters supporting Mitt Romney for president and 47 percent supporting President Barack Obama.

North Carolina is the ninth state CNN is calling a toss-up, joining Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin. CNN’s electoral map shows Obama with 237 electoral votes and Romney with 191; there are still 110 electoral votes undecided (270 electoral votes are needed for victory).

No matter what side polls the hotly contested 8th Congressional District race, it's a dead heat.

Republican Richard Hudson released an internal poll this week showing him with a one-point advantage, 38 percent to 37 percent with a quarter of voters undecided, or essentially a statistical tie. The polling memo from OnMessage, a GOP firm, did not release the poll questions or margin of error, making it difficult to gauge the authenticity of the numbers.

A week earlier, Democratic incumbent Larry Kissell released his own internal poll showing him with a four-point lead, again a tie. The margin of error on the Anzalone Liszt poll was plus-or-minus 4.4 percent, though the specifics of the poll were not disclosed, so its credibility is unclear.

A new SurveyUSA poll calls the presidential race a toss up in North Carolina -- a storyline that is likely to continue through November in this battleground state.

Mitt Romney holds a negligible lead at 45 percent to President Barack Obama's 44 percent -- within the poll's margin of error. The survey of likely voters was conducted for WRAL-TV and fits within the results of other result polls. Romney is winning independent 45-32 percent but Obama takes ideological moderates 48-37 percent.

As for Obama's support for gay marriage, 55 percent say it's important to their decision for president while 43 percent say it's not very important or not a factor. Within those numbers, black voters are the largest group saying it's not a factor at all, at 30 percent. This demographic apparently helped propel North Carolina's recent marriage amendment to passage. Click below for the full SurveyUSA write up.

UPDATED: With Tuesday's primary election days away, here's a horse-race primer breaking down the first-quarter contributions and recent survey results from Public Policy Polling, a liberal-leaning firm, and the Civitas Institute, a conservative group. (See full list by clicking Read More.)

First, a few observations: Public Policy Polling and Civitas reach pretty similar polling results, despite different political leanings, at least on horse-race surveys. The exceptions: the Democratic labor commissioner race and the Republican lieutenant governor's race.

The money leader in the each contest is winning except in the Democratic lieutenant governor's race (caveat, SEANC is essentially funding Linda Coleman's campaign) and the GOP primaries for state treasurer and secretary of state. And the down ballot races include huge (50 percent in most cases) portions of undecided voters. Expect runoffs in many of these races with crowded fields.