Most presidential election polls show Republican challenger Mitt Romney with solid advantage over President Barack Obama among small business owners. But recent surveys indicate the gap may be narrowing while a significant number of small business owners say they still have not decided which, if either, candidate would be good for business.

A national poll conducted released earlier this month found small business owners favored Romney over Obama 47-35 percent. But Romney’s number was down from 61 percent in August, while the president’s share was up from 26 percent, according to the survey of more than 1,800 business owners from the Columbus, Ohio-based Manta Media Inc., which promotes small businesses online.

The poll also broke out results for critical swing states, including Ohio and eight other states where the small business vote could play a pivotal role in a close election.

The swing-state results showed 48 percent of small business owners favored Romney, while the president had the support of 38 percent of respondents — up 6 percentage points from the previous Manta survey.

A separate poll this month from George Washington University and Thumbtack.com — another online marketplace for for small businesses — found 39 percent of small business owners supported Obama, while 31 percent favored Romney.

About a quarter of small business owners in both polls remained undecided, far higher than the percentage of all voters who remain undecided.

Bryan Marshall, a political science professor at Miami University, said it’s difficult to draw conclusions about why business owners lean one way or the other, politically.

But, he said, any increased business support for Obama likely stems from the recent rise in consumer confidence.

“The more positive outlook by small business owners reflects the more positive outlook that consumers have,” Marshall said. “Those are small businesses’ customers…they drive 70 percent of the economy.”

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index is the highest it has been in eight months, and the latest Gallup Poll measuring U.S. small business owner satisfaction was up sharply in the third quarter this year — showing 39 percent of small-business owners felt extremely or very successful, the highest level since the third quarter of 2010.

Steve Hightower, an Obama supporter and chief executive of Middletown-based Hightowers Petroleum Co., said the national distributor’s sales have grown nearly 200 percent since the president took office in 2009, which has allowed him to add eight new employees.

“We’ve continued to add customers and make new hires in the petroleum business, so I don’t know how I could say his policies have hurt me,” Hightower said. “I know certain sectors aren’t doing as well, but most of the businesses I talk to are doing much, much better with a bigger bottom line.”

Hightower said he’ll vote for Obama because he believes Romney wants to repeal many of the policies that have helped his business grow.

“I don’t want to undue a positive trend,” Hightower said. “All of these things that Romney wants to come in an undue would be extremely regressive for the business climate and have us starting from zero.”

In sharp contrast, Romney says the Obama administration’s policies have been the main impediment to business growth, and he continues to pound the president on issues such as taxes, regulation and the cost of the president’s signature health care law.

“We’re buying gold, silver and jewelry from clients across the Miami Valley that are having to sell, not because they want to, but because they’re trying to make ends meet due to how this economy is,” said John Stafford, owner of Stafford Jewelers in Dayton. “So we’re seeing the direct affect of this current administration’s fiscal policies.”

Regardless of their political leanings, growing jobs and the economy was the top concern for many local small businesses.

“The major impediment to our growth (is) finding qualified workers,” said Jay Moran, who owns A-Abel Family of Services in Washington Township, which provides heating, plumbing and other home services.

Moran said he’ll vote for Romney because he thinks the former Bain Capital chief executive has the best credentials to support small businesses. But regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, Moran said: “Our leadership…has got to address the (national) debt, Social Security, and energy dependence” that has slowed economic growth and drained his customers’ pocketbooks.

Will Thorpe, a Dayton-area graphic artist and photographer, said small business owners like him have more at stake than most voters in the upcoming election, because each candidate has proposed vastly divergent policies. That’s why he’s not voting for either one of the major party candidates, and instead plans to vote for third-party candidate Gary Johnson, a Libertarian.

“Obama and Romney are both idiots,” Thorpe said. “One wants to give power to the corporations; one wants to giver power to the government. I could care less about either one of them because I want individual freedom.”