On the eve of President Barack Obama’s acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention last week, a statewide poll showed the native son was leading his Republican opponent by 17 percentage points here.

The poll of 1,382 likely Illinois voters was taken Sept. 5 by We Ask America. It had Obama at 54 percent to Mitt Romney’s 37 percent. Another 3.33 percent said they’d be voting for an unnamed third-party candidate, and 6 percent were undecided.

That’s way below where Obama was 4 years ago, when he won Illinois with 62 percent of the vote.