After lagging for months at historic lows, Mitt Romney's personal popularity has advanced in the final weekend to its highest of the 2012 campaign, rivaling Barack Obama's. But Obama pushes back with greater enthusiasm among his supporters - and the race itself remains a tie.

Fifty-four percent of likely voters in the latest ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll express a favorable opinion of Obama overall, the most basic measure of a public figure's popularity. Yet 53 percent now see Romney favorably - a majority, remarkably, for the first time.

See PDF with full results and charts here.

It's a dramatic gain for Romney, who emerged from the Republican primaries as the least popular major party candidate in polling back to 1984 and remained there up to the debates. Just 40 percent saw him favorably as recently as late August, and it was essentially no better, 44 percent, after the party conventions.

The presidential debates clearly helped him: Sixty-two percent of likely voters describe Romney's performance in the debates as a factor in their vote, and those who do so are a broad 23 points more likely to see him favorably overall, 61 percent vs. 38 percent. Substantially fewer cite Obama's handling of the response to Hurricane Sandy as a factor in their vote, 49 percent.

While the gap in overall favorability has closed to naught, and the debates boosted Romney's personal popularity, Obama holds advantages in strength of support. Thirty-eight percent of likely voters see him "strongly" favorably, 8 percentage points more than say the same about Romney. "Strong" approval of the president's job performance, at 34 percent, ties its highest since 2009, and is nearly double its low in August 2011. And the share of Obama's backers who say they're "very" enthusiastic about him has reached its highest of the campaign, moving ahead of Romney's by a significant margin, 6 points, for the first time in two weeks.

Notably, with 69 percent of his supporters very enthusiastic, the president has regained the strength-of-support levels he achieved in the 2008 election, after running behind that pace earlier this fall. Romney's come even farther, more than doubling strong enthusiasm among his supporters since the spring, to 63 percent now, also numerically a new high.

THE RACE - These elements play out in a race that couldn't be closer: Obama and Romney receive 48 percent support apiece among likely voters in this survey, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates. By several standards their long-running deadlock has constituted the closest race in pre-election polling in decades.

As if it's needed, independents - potentially swing voters in national elections - provide a further exclamation point. They now also divide precisely evenly, 46-46 percent. That matches Obama's best to date among independents, and it's a new low in this group for Romney, who'd reached 58 percent support among independents just a week and a half ago.

One reason the bottom line has not been affected is that, as he's slipped among independents, Romney's bulked up among Republicans, with a new high of 97 percent support in his own party. If that holds Tuesday it'd surpass the in-party record in exit polls dating to 1976 - 93 percent for George W. Bush in 2004.

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Romney Rises in Favorability; Obama's Pushback is Intensity