The question now is: is Republican Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s lead over Democratic Sen. Barack Obama a convention “bounce,” or a sign of a larger 2008 political realignment in the wake of his pick of Gov. Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate? That’ll be the question to keep in mind more and more as the latest Gallup Daily Tracking poll shows McCain retaining his lead:
The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update finds John McCain maintaining his five-point lead versus Barack Obama among registered voters, 49% to 44%.
McCain led Obama by five percentage points in Monday’s report on the strength of a six-point increase in the percentage of voters choosing him on the presidential trial heat following the Republican National Convention. McCain’s 49% support in today’s three-day rolling average, based on Sept. 6-8 interviewing, is unchanged from Monday’s report and matches McCain’s high mark in Gallup tracking to date.
Gallup polling in recent days has been quite stable, showing McCain ahead of Obama by similar margins in each of the last four individual days of nightly tracking. McCain also had a 4-point lead over Obama among registered voters in the separate USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted this past weekend.
The GOP convention has clearly altered the structure of the race for now, which had shown Obama consistently ahead in the Gallup Poll Daily tracking updates for all but a few days from the time he clinched the nomination in early June until the end of last week.
Gallup notes that if historical trends hold, Obama will stay down in the polls for one month:
While the increased vote share a candidate receives following his convention usually diminishes, candidates who lead after the second convention usually remain the leader a month after the convention. This is based on a review of historical Gallup data since 1964 — the first year for which Gallup could reliably measure convention bounces. The only possible exception to this general pattern occurred in 1980, when Jimmy Carter had a slim one-point advantage after the Democratic National Convention but he and Ronald Reagan were exactly tied one month after Carter was nominated for a second term.
Thus, if Obama regains the lead over the next month, he will be bucking the historical trend.
The bottom line: as polls are showing, Obama is no longer the front-runner amid defections from independent, white women and even some conservative Democratic voters. Add to that the McCain-Palin ticket now attracting big and enthusiastic crowds and the conventional wisdom is being tossed out the window again to make way for a new conventional wisdom.
Will this conventional wisdom be the one that remains until Election Day?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.