A new poll from the Civitas Institute found that the Democratic ticket of President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden is 4 percentage points ahead of the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan.
The Civitas Poll of 600 likely North Carolina voters was taken Sept. 18-19 and had a margin of error of plus-minus 4 percent, Civitas said.
Poll: Obama leads Romney in NC, 49-45
Now, this should be taken with a grain of salt, as Civitas is a right-wing institute, and has had some funky results in the past (their last poll conducted with SUSA had Romney +10, with Romney getting a ridiculous 30% of the black vote).
But this is yet more great news for the President, and crappy news for the losing Romney/Ryan ticket. It should be noted that 4 of the last 5 polls of North Carolina have had Obama ahead, with Rasmussen as the one poll showing Romney ahead, natch. If any media organisation still has NC has a "Romney lean" state on their map, they're starting to look pretty silly.
EDIT: Via bear83, we now have crosstabs from Civitas. The crosstabs check out great upon examination. Correct proportion of Dems and Repubs, correction proportion of black voters, Obama winning the black vote 92-4, etc.
I dunno about Civitas overall, but this poll looks legit.
10:19 AM PT: An interesting tidbit from the article: 'Civitas said this was the first North Carolina poll to include the vice presidential candidates.'
Could Paul Ryan be a drag on Romney in North Carolina? We can't determine that just from this one poll, for which we don't have internals. But it's interesting to consider.