Recent polling trends suggest President Barack Obama and Senate candidate Rep. Tammy Baldwin are both gaining traction in the state of Wisconsin.

The most recent poll from Marquette University Law School shows the President with a 14 point lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney. The same poll has Baldwin now pulling ahead of former Republican Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson by 9 points.

The Marquette poll was released hours after Quinnipiac University released its own poll of Wisconsin. That poll showed Baldwin dead even with Thompson at 47 percent.

The new results are a clear tightening of the race for Baldwin as the previous Quinnipiac poll had her trailing Thompson by six points. Quinnipiac's poll had the President expanding his lead over his rival from a two point spread in August to a six point spread now.

Professor Charles Franklin said that while there was very little movement among individuals who self identify as Democrats and Republicans, with the exception of a small galvanizing of the Democratic base, the biggest trend was independents shifting their support from Thompson to Baldwin.

The gender gap seems to be hitting Romney especially hard in Wisconsin. Quinnipiac has women breaking for Obama 55-42 and Marquette has Obama up 54-38. Quinnipiac has Romney doing much better with men in Wisconsin as he leads Obama 49-47. However, Marquette had decidedly different results putting Obama ahead with men 53-42.

An interesting cross tab to look at is how Obama and Baldwin do in the various media markets. Marquette breaks it down by Milwaukee City, "rest of Milwaukee media market," Madison, Green Bay/Appleton, and "all other media markets." Both Obama and Baldwin easily defeat their opponents in all of the media markets except for the "rest of Milwaukee media markets." In that region of the state Romney defeats Obama in the poll 53-39, and Thompson defeats Baldwin 49-40.

The Marquette poll was the only pollster to accurately predict the results of the June 5 recall of Governor Scott Walker.

Both of the polls were conducted after the conventions and the embassy raid in Libya, but before Romney's "47 percent" video went viral.

Jesse Russell

Co-Editor

Jesse was born and raised in Connecticut, began blogging in 1997, and moved to Madison in 2003. In 2005, he co-founded dane101 along with Kristian Knutson and Shane Wealti. In addition to helping nearly a dozen contributors run this website he's helped launch various events in the city including What's Your Damage?!, the MadPubQuiz of Awesomeness, the Fire Ball Masquerade, Dane101's Freakin' Halloweekend, and more.