Here are the latest national polls on the presidential race:Newsweek:Kerry 51%, Bush 45%
USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll: Kerry 50%, Bush 45%
Lots of news today. Polls are in for 18 states and all of them are post Edwards. Was there an Edwards bounce? Yes. Kerry picked up 30 electoral votes since yesterday and now leads by 117 EV. Of the new state polls, Kerry is ahead in 12, Bush is ahead in 4, and one is an exact tie. Since all of these are battleground states, this is good news for Kerry. He is ahead in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Missouri. There is no conceivable scenario in which Bush can lose the majority of these states and win the election. But before Kerry supporters start popping the champagne corks, note that the vice-presidential bounce is usually short lived. Two weeks from now we will find out how much real change there is, if any.
Hmm, I wonder what can we look forward to two weeks from now?
Posted by Mike at July 14, 2004 03:03 PM | TrackBack
PRINCETON, NJ -- We are now approaching the convention period of this year's presidential campaign. The Democrats will hold their convention in Boston July 26-29, while the Republicans will follow with their convention in New York Aug. 30-Sept. 2.The overt business of the conventions no longer has much importance. The two major parties' conventions have become little more than four-day pep rallies for each party's candidates and platforms, both of which in reality are determined well before the conventions get underway. There is minimal real news that bubbles up from the convention floor.
But the conventions provide a critically important public relations function. Even with reduced prime-time coverage by the traditional broadcast networks, the average American is exposed to a continuous diet of four days of focused attention on a party's presidential and vice-presidential nominees during a convention.
And this focus affects voters. An analysis of past polling in election years documents that a party's ticket typically enjoys a "bounce" in the horse-race polls after its convention.
The fact that these convention bounces occur has become part of the political conventional wisdom. Journalists and pundits discuss the bounces at great length. They have become one of the most well-documented phenomena in modern political polling.