Poll: Obama keeps small lead on Romney, debate drop stemmed

WASHINGTON - US President Barack Obama retained a slim lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the Reuters/Ipsos daily tracking poll on Monday, as he appeared to have stemmed the bleeding from his poor first debate.Three weeks before the Nov. 6 US election, Obama leads Romney by 2 percentage points, with 47 percent support from likely voters in the national online poll, to 45 percent support for Romney.The margin was small enough to be a virtual tie, but Obama's slight edge broadened from Sunday, when he went ahead of Romney by 1 point after falling behind in the wake of Romney's decisive victory in their first presidential debate on Oct. 3."Romney received a bump from that first debate, but the very nature of a bump is it recedes again," Ipsos vice president Julia Clark said. "We're now seeing Obama regaining a little bit of a foothold as we go into the second debate. They go into the debate on equal footing."The two men meet again on Tuesday night at New York's Hofstra University in a debate that Obama needs to win to grab back the campaign momentum. The third debate is set for Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Florida.