Individual state polls may be turning up interesting results, but a look at the overall polls shows little movement over the past week, which is a boon for the poll leader, Barack Obama, writes FiveThirtyEight.

“While there are plenty of individual results for Matt Drudge to get excited about (or for that matter the Huffington Post), the fact is that the overall trend in this election is roughly flat, and has been for about a week or so. That is bad news for the candidate trailing in the race, which in this case is John McCain.

“Five of the eight tracking polls moved toward Barack Obama today; the other three moved toward John McCain. It’s possible that there was a very slight shift in momentum toward John McCain last week, and that it’s been counteracted by a similar shift toward Barack Obama after the Colin Powell endorsement. It’s also possible that we’ve simply been reading too much into what amounts to statistical noise. Either way, our Super Tracker thinks that Obama is now no more than half a point off his peak numbers, which were realized earlier this month. John McCain needs to begin closing these numbers, and soon.”

Read the full story (and view polling stats and graphs) here.