September 01, 2008
What To Expect When You're Expecting A Bounce
By
Reid Wilson
The speeches are spoken. The delegates have voted. Barack Obama is the nominee of the Democratic Party, and he's off on a post-convention tour of battleground states with his newly minted running mate, Joe Biden.
Now comes The Bounce. Or what the media is expecting, post-convention movement in national polls that show a sustained boost for either Obama or Republican rival John McCain after the two get face time with the thirty million or more Americans who will tune in to their acceptance speeches.
But bounces are fickle things, and only a few candidates in the past few decades have seen real, sustained growth following their nominations that lasts deep into the brief general election campaign. In fact, most pollsters and consultants agree, in a race as close as the one between Obama and McCain, any substantial movement is highly unlikely.
"I think a three- to five-point bounce is about all you can get with a race this close," said Ed Rollins, the Republican strategist who managed Ronald Reagan's successful 1984 re-election bid. Democratic insider Lanny Davis, who before serving as special counsel to Bill Clinton was a pollster himself, pointed out that the average bounce over the past two decades has been no more than five points.
Sometimes, candidates have stellar conventions that provide a measurable and ongoing boost. George H.W. Bush entered his 1988 convention trailing Michael Dukakis by seven points and left with a four-point lead. That lead grew to eight points a month after Bush's convention, and he went on to win the presidency by a wide margin.
Clinton got perhaps the biggest bounce in modern polling history, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center from 2000. Four years after the Bush bounce, Clinton entered the convention tied at 45% with the incumbent president and left with a massive 58%-35% lead. A month later, that twenty-three-point lead had settled to an eighteen-point advantage, and Clinton won a three-way contest in November.
By contrast, Bush's own 1992 gathering did not live up to his previous convention experience. Bush entered the Astrodome in Houston, Texas trailing by twenty-two. After the convention, the gap had narrowed by a considerable fifteen points, at which point Bush trailed 48%-41%. But a month later, Clinton's bounce proved the one that stuck.
In 1996, Bob Dole made up significant ground on Clinton, closing a twenty-one point gap to a three-point gap in a matter of a week. But after Clinton's own convention, the president had moved out to a ten-point lead that he never relinquished.
More recently, thanks to increased news coverage and increased polarization, bounces are tiny by comparison. Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport reported John Kerry actually lost a point after his Boston gathering, while President Bush advanced just two points among registered voters after his convention, taking a 49%-48% lead. "The average post-convention 'bounce' among registered voters historically has been about five to seven points," Newport wrote after the GOP convention that year. "So the bounces from both conventions [in 2004] have been significantly diminished from the historical pattern."
Then again, even a good lead coming out of the conventions is not indicative of a final outcome. Following the 2000 convention, Al Gore enjoyed a nearly double-digit bounce and led by as much six points in surveys a month after his August convention. The results in November were a race almost as close to evenly divided as possible.
That dramatic drop, and others throughout history, give both parties pause this year when they consider whether to get excited about a momentary boost or sag. "Al Gore came out of the convention plus ten, and he lost ten points in September and October," Davis said. "I'm not suggesting we [Democrats] should be optimistic because of a post-convention lead."
After a feud between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, poll numbers are the media's favorite story, and searching for The Bounce will become the national obsession in the coming two weeks. And the day before Obama's speech, there is already evidence that the Democrat is seeing an early jump in the polls. The Gallup daily tracking poll showed Obama jumping from a statistically-insignificant 45%-44% lead on August 26 to a solid 48%-42% lead on August 27. By the weekend, though, the lead had stayed at six points.
Given the way Gallup conducts their surveys -- a three-day rolling average of interviews -- that means respondents on Tuesday evening gave Obama a much bigger lead than respondents on Sunday and Monday. Newport's daily analysis suggests that is the beginning of Obama's convention bounce. "All these Republican wishful thinkers [who say] there isn't going to be a bounce here, based on one night of polling, that isn't going to pan out," Davis said.
But ironically, four years after the Athens Olympics gave President Bush a financial head start, the Beijing Olympics forced national Democrats to make a difficult choice about when to hold their conventions as well.
The incumbent party traditionally holds their gathering last. In 2004, Democrats held their gathering the week before the Olympics, forcing nominee John Kerry to stretch his public financing money a full four weeks longer than President Bush; Bush had not been formally nominated by his party, meaning he could continue to freely spend primary election money.
This year, Democrats didn't want to face the same conundrum and chose to hold the Denver confab immediately after the closing ceremonies in China. That is going to impact any bounce either party will get, said Republican Rollins, given the single weekend separating the two events. "With the conventions on top of each other, it may all equal out by mid-September," he said.
That threatens Obama's and McCain's convention bounce. But given the small advantage a convention historically offers a presidential candidate, the impact of The Bounce is perhaps the most overstated aspect of the presidential election.
With a narrowly-divided electorate, the Obama campaign isn't banking on a big boost. "We expect the polls to remain close all the way through Election Day," Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan said. The campaign is likely to be proven more right than those who search for a major post-convention shift in either direction.
Reid Wilson is an associate editor and writer for RealClearPolitics. He can be reached at
reid@realclearpolitics.com
