We have reached the third and will quickly being heading into the fourth quarter of presidential contest. On Monday, Republicans will gather in Tampa, Florida for a week's festivities culminating in the acceptance of the nomination for president by Mitt Romney. So, as convention season approaches, just where do we stand in the race, and where will head from here?

In the contest for the White House, President Obama maintains a slim, but fairly consistent advantage. Let's examine that lead nationally and then on a state-by-state level.

Looking at the popular vote, we have two separate sets of data: registered voters and likely voters. Over the past month, six companies have released likely voter polls. Controlling for the multiplicity of Rasmussen polls, the median result is an Obama lead of 1.5 points.

There have also been 12 polling outfits that have produced registered voter polls during this time. They range from a 10-point Obama lead, in a Pew Research poll, to a tie, in an aggregate of Gallup polls over last month. Obama's median lead in registered voter polls is about 4 percentage points.

Will registered voter polls resemble more closely likely voter polls once pollsters switch over to likely voter models? Right now, it appears that Republicans will gain something between 2 and 3 percentage points on average when pollsters start polling among likely voters. Both the Monmouth University and the Fox News poll found it to be 3 points, while the latest LA Times poll determined it to be only 1 point.

Applying a 2- to 3-point difference to registered voter polls would bring the registered voter polls in pretty much perfect alignment with the likely voter median. As Jay Cost and many others have pointed out, there is a danger in taking likely voter polls to the bank this early. Still, Republicans have generally been more certain to vote this year.

Put another way, I think Obama probably holds a lead of about 1.5 percentage points among the electorate most likely to show up on election day. The likely voter electorate could change, but this is a best guess presently.

What about the state-level data, which at the end of this campaign is all that matters?

I've gathered all the polls done over the last month in the heavily polled states (at least five polls) such as Florida, and polling back to June in states with less data such as Iowa. There are very few registered voter polls on the state level, but I apply a 2.5 point penalty against Obama for those polls that were of registered voters (except for Public Policy Polling, which already has a tight registered voter screen). I've also used my discretion to eliminate certain polls that are poorly executed and are clear outliers.

Obama leads in eight of 11 swing states, Romney takes the cake in two, and Colorado is tied. Obama would hold a 294 to 235 electoral vote lead, with nine electoral votes undecided. His advantage may, however, be slightly larger than that number indicates.

The state that puts either candidate over the top, the tipping point, in the medians is not actually Ohio. It's Virginia, where Obama's median lead is 1.5 percentage points.

The reason Ohio is less important than it was previously is because of the Paul Ryan effect in Wisconsin, which makes the electoral math easier for Romney without having to win Ohio. Given campaigns and margins of errors in polling, however, it could still prove to be the case that Ohio is the most important state in this election.

When we gather the medians from the 11 states and weight by population, we end up with an Obama edge of 2 points in the swing states. When we concentrate on the eight most important states, which are all those listed above save Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, Obama's lead is only 1 percentage point. Average the two and you get Obama by 1.5 percentage points, right where the national data would put it.

So, how will the convention affect the status of this campaign? The median bounce for each candidate since 1964 has been about 5 points. According to Gallup, the challenger typically does slightly better than the incumbent. Thomas Holbrook looks at the same data and expects Romney to gain 3.6 percentage points, while Obama gains only 1.1 percentage points. That would put Romney into the lead.

That said, this race has been very steady. The closest analogue to this election, that of 2004, actually saw the incumbent receiving a slight bounce, while the challenger lost a few points. And 2004, like 2012, featured an early, prior announcement of the vice-presidential nominee by the challenger.

So, there is no guarantee that Romney will jump into the lead following the Republican National Convention. On the other hand, even a 1-point boost for Romney nationally would bring this race to near parity. A small bounce would also suggest the electorate is not static and will shift allegiances under the right circumstances.

No shift would portend very bad news for Romney. The explanatory power of polls jumps considerably after the conventions. If Obama still leads by 1.5 points once the convention dust has settled, it's difficult for me to envisage how Obama will lose. Conventions are typically the one campaign event that can have big effect on the state of the race.

For now, all we can say is that Obama holds a slight lead, but that we'll know a lot more in a little under three weeks' time.