The Convention Bounce Polling Report [9.10.12]

The most recent national tracking polls from Sunday:

NATIONAL–Gallup Tracking: Obama 49, Romney 44
NATIONAL–Ipsos/Reuters Tracking: Obama 47, Romney 43
NATIONAL–Rasmussen: Obama 49, Romney 45

Like Josh Marshall at TPM, I tend not to like Tracking polls, as their day to day polling samples are susceptible to instability and over or under sampling. Still, as of today, Obama has bounced up to a 5 point lead in Gallup, and a four point lead in Ipsos and Rasmussen. And the uniformity of the bounce across three polls is something to take note of.

Josh thinks it represents a pretty big shift that is not yet fully revealed (note that Josh wrote this on Saturday, and his numbers are a little stale, and they have moved even further in Obama’s direction):

Now let’s look at the movement over the past two days. Gallup has moved from O+1 to O+4 — a 3 point move to Obama. Ipsos and Rasmussen have both moved 5 points in Obama’s direction over the last two days.

That’s a rapid move and very consistent across three separate polls. But the key to understanding these numbers is to remember that these are tracking polls. So a significant amount of the data in each is from calls prior to the big speeches at the Democratic convention, especially for Gallup which has the longest collection interval. Nate Silver calculates that to get the numbers to move that quickly Obama has likely been up between 7 to 9 points since the Clinton speech. Meanwhile other pollsters currently in the field suggest they’re seeing numbers that look similar to 2008.

Indeed, this is what Nate Silver says about the movement:

On average between the four polls [DD: the fourth one being an online poll that we are not counting], it appears that Mr. Obama must have held about an eight-point lead since Mr. Clinton’s speech in order to have gained so much ground so quickly.

On August 31, Rasmussen had Romney ahead by 4 (48-44) and now Obama is ahead by 4 (49-45). That is an 8 point bounce, confirming Josh’s thoughts above. And considering this is Rasmussen, which gives the GOP a 2-3 point or more house advantage, the bounce could be even more.

It will be interesting to see if that kind of bounce continues through the polling samples on Thursday and Friday. In my opinion, Clinton’s speech was the high point of the convention. On Thursday, President Obama gave a good speech that was obviously targeted to independent and undecided voters, but it was not his best ever. But then again, I may be viewing at as a partisan coming down from the high that was Clinton’s tour de force. And, further, Joe Biden’s speech was great, although many drinking game players died from the over use of Biden’s favorite verbal crutch, “literally.” But I think it is possible that the 8 point lead high might come down to a 5 or 6 once it all averages out.

Silver also points out that Romney has never been ahead of Obama this year in the poll of polls. He got close and has tied Obama, but never led, and this, for challengers hoping to win, is not a good sign:

John McCain held occasional leads in 2008; John Kerry led for much of the summer in 2004; and Michael Dukakis had moments where he was well ahead of George H.W. Bush in the spring and summer of 1988… The cases where one candidate led essentially from wire to wire have been associated with landslides: Bill Clinton in 1996, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.

In fact, Romney’s own convention may have hurt him. The Princeton Election Consortium finds that Romney got a negative bounce from his convention, which may be a first in modern times:

“Indeed, it appears that the race shifted towards President Obama by 6-15 EV, or about 1.0% of Popular Vote Meta-Margin. From an analytical perspective, a negative bounce is quite remarkable because all the talk in recent weeks has been of bounces being smaller or zero, but always in the hosting party’s favor. It is all the more remarkable because of the relatively small number of state polls over the last week, so that the Meta-analysis’s inputs have not fully turned over… So the negative bounce may be larger than what is shown in the graph. Such an event would have been missed in past years (and even this year) because national polls don’t have the best resolution.”

Meanwhile, we have not many state polls since my last post. In fact, we have had one:

NEW JERSEY–Quinnipiac: Obama 51, Romney 44

But we did get a clue into campaign internal polling from Ohio, and boy is it good news:

President Barack Obama heads out of the national political conventions with a much clearer path to winning, top advisers to Mitt Romney privately concede […]

“Their map has many more routes to victory,” said a top Republican official. Two officials intimately involved in the GOP campaign said Ohio leans clearly in Obama’s favor now, with a high single-digit edge, based on their internal tracking numbers of conservative groups. Romney can still win the presidency if he loses Ohio, but it’s extremely difficult.

Shockingly, this fits with what Obama campaign officials were saying in Charlotte, that their internal daily tracking polls showed Obama up 9 points. The last legit poll out of Ohio was Quinnipiac two weeks ago had the race 50-44 in Obama’s favor, a 6 point lead. So if the internals from last week are right, Obama got a three point bounce in Ohio from Romney’s convention!!! This week, we will see how much of a bounce Obama gets from his own in Ohio.

UPDATE: And just like that, PPP releases a poll late Sunday night with the following details:

So Obama leads in Ohio 50-45, a 5 point margin that exceeds his 2008 margin, even though the demographics of the poll were more favorable to the Republicans than what was the Ohio electorate in 2008. So if Obama gets a turnout of Democratic voters similar to 2008, his margin increases to the high single digits.

This race has the feeling of breaking open. I have always felt that this election was not going to a close election, a la 2000 or 2004. I have felt it was going to more resemble 1996 or 2008, but not a 49 state reelection a la 1964, 1972 or 1984 as such blowouts are pretty much impossible anymore, given the current political landscape. I don’t know why, just a feeling based on an evaluation of the candidates. And now we are seeing the ingredients coming together to retroactively justify my gut feeling. Indeed, if the Obama bounce continues to increase, and the President holds an 8-10 point lead in the national polls in two weeks, then you are going to see certain states in our map below that are currently shaded in lighter colors become darker blue, and Missouri and Indiana and Georgia and North Carolina and Arizona will be the new swing states that all might fall into the President’s column.