After Hurricane Sandy made landfall on Oct. 29, it gave President Obama the opportunity to play a bipartisan leader during a time of crisis a week before the election. At that time, Mitt Romney led President Obama by 0.8 points in the average of polls compiled by Real Clear Politics, and now, with the final wave of polls in, Obama leads by 0.7 points. There could be plenty of alternative explanations for these gains besides Sandy. But Gallup — which had Romney up five points before the storm, suspended polling during the storm, and now has him up just one — provides this tidbit:

To be clear, I don’t want to be confused with somebody arguing that Romney had all the momentum and that Sandy cost him the election. If Romney loses, we’ll have plenty of time to debate what went wrong, but I wouldn’t be among those blaming Sandy. By my observation of polls, Romney got a huge boost after his dominant performance in the first debate, and then seemed to hit a wall in Ohio and other swing states after about a week or so. If I were asked to make a prediction before Sandy, I would have issued a similar one to the one I did yesterday — pointing to a narrow Obama Electoral College victory. We’ll know tonight whether the state polls on which I based my prediction were accurate.