Neither side can say confidently which way the November 6 election is running, and the stress levels are high.
Despite efforts by Obama's advisers to put a brave face on it, the standing of the Democrat President among voters is not what his team would want at this late point.
Obama's much more upbeat, aggressive performance in this week's second-round presidential debate has re-energised his party base, after widespread disappointment with the first encounter when he was subdued and Romney dominated.
But Obama does not appear to have done enough to arrest late momentum running Romney's way. The latest Gallup tracking poll, released yesterday, which includes some feedback from the second debate, shows Romney has extended his lead among likely voters at a national level by 52 to 45 per cent.
The Republican's seven-point lead now stretches well outside the margin of error, surely uncomfortable for the Obama side.
In nine battleground states where the election is expected to be decided, Obama retains slight leads in most, according to a tracking model by Huffpost's pollster.com.
He is narrowly ahead in Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Hampshire and Nevada.
But Obama's advantage in these states has slipped dramatically since last month, and he is now either lineball or slightly behind Romney in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.
The bottom-line challenge for Romney is whether or not he can snare the presidency by scoring 270 electoral college votes across the US that are allocated state by state on a winner-takes-all basis for each one.
Last month, Obama had commanding leads in Ohio (which accounts for 18 electoral college votes), Wisconsin (10) and Virginia (13). It meant Romney's path to the 270 total he needs looked fraught.
The prospect now of winning Florida (29), North Carolina (15) and Virginia, and trending well for wins in some of the rest, puts Romney within striking distance.
Obama's central problem is that his voter support is soft, perhaps too soft.
He enjoyed a strong poll bounce in the wake of last month's Democratic National Convention thanks to positive publicity from his nomination acceptance speech and harsh words about his opponent from surrogates such as former president Bill Clinton.
The negative image of Romney was shattered in the first debate when he presented as a moderate Republican in command of policy detail and appeared a reasonable alternative to Obama.
For many voters only starting to engage in the election campaign, especially working women, this debate was their introduction to Romney: he did not seem to fit the mould cast for him by Obama and the Democrat machine as an extreme right-winger out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. Here was Romney, as his wife, Ann, put it, "unfiltered, without any negative ads".
Even though Obama performed well in this week's second debate, Romney gave an assured performance once again. He pointed to the slowness of the US economy's recovery from recession under Obama and prosecuted the case that re-electing the President at a time of high unemployment would bring four more years of the same.
The hard-headed strategists in Obama's camp, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, always expected some late tightening in polls that would make a close election inevitable.
But the current trend, if it continues, must surely set off a panic inside the campaign. With two weeks to go, how can Obama realistically peg back a seven-point lead unless there is something drastically wrong with Gallup's methodology?
The heavy-duty work of the Obama side in the remaining days will be to somehow persuade women - who previously supported the Democrat President by a considerable margin but now support the two candidates almost evenly - that their original suspicions about Romney were right.
Obama has the votes of Latinos and African-Americans sewn up. He cannot win a majority of white males. The rest of his campaign will be all about winning back women. If Romney cannot be portrayed as an extremist any more, Obama will stick to branding him a flip-flopper who changes his view to suit his audience.
Desperation to reclaim the female vote explains why the Obama camp is jumping on Romney's response to a debate question about what he would do for equal pay by recalling how he asked staff for "binders full of women" when selecting his cabinet as governor of Massachusetts.
It explains determined efforts by Obama and his team to undermine Romney's position on birth control and abortion. And it explains highlighting the Republican's pledge to scrap funding for Planned Parenthood, an agency that looks after women's health and offers birth control advice.
Campaigning in New Hampshire yesterday, Obama told a campaign crowd that Romney still could not say whether he supported a law making it easier for women to fight for equal pay. "I've got two daughters," he said. "I want to make sure they get paid the same as somebody's sons for doing the same job. Pretty straightforward. Any confusion there?"
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