Democrat Barack Obama’s lead over Republican John McCain in the race for president has dropped to 14 points in Rhode Island, with 45 percent favoring Obama and 31 percent for McCain, according to the latest Rhode Island College poll of the state’s voters.

Obama had held a 28-point lead over McCain in late June polling by the college’s Bureau of Government Research and Services.

Fifteen percent of voters, however, were undecided in this Democrat-leaning state.

A survey of Rhode Island voters released earlier this week by Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy generated almost the same numbers, with Obama leading McCain, 47 percent to 34 percent. In August, he led McCain 50 percent to 30 percent.

RIC said its survey was timed to measure opinions before the debate between Obama and McCain scheduled for tonight. Most of the interviews were conducted, it said, before McCain suspended campaigning to focus on the economic bailout proposal and asked Obama to cancel the debate. Yesterday, the two candidates met with President Bush as part of his bid to sell the bailout plan.

The latest survey by the college also found:

•Three out of four respondents believe the state is going in the wrong direction — down from 8 out of 10, or 80 percent, in June. Seventy-four percent said “wrong track” in the current poll, 12 percent said “right direction,” 12 percent said they don’t know and 1 percent did not answer.

•Democrats in the General Assembly are the most to blame for Rhode Island’s financial problems, but they fared better than they did in June. Forty-one percent of the surveyed voters blamed Democrats in June. The number is now 34 percent. And 28 percent now put the most blame on Governor Carcieri, a Republican. Twenty-three percent said both the Democrats and Carcieri.

•Support for Governor Carcieri’s executive order cracking down on illegal immigration, including requiring use of the federal E-Verify system by employers, is all but unchanged from June. Seventy-five percent agreed with it in June. It’s 73 percent now.

•Forty-nine percent of those surveyed support oil drilling in Alaska. That’s up from 42 percent in June.

The survey, conducted Sept. 17-24, used a sample of 742 voters, randomly chosen from voting lists provided by the secretary of state’s office. The poll has margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. The sample was controlled to reflect likely voter contribution by geographic region.

mmckinne@projo.com