I was planning to be a good boy and avoid all discussion of convention bounces until at least the middle of the week, but I’ve decided to cave in. Is this irresponsible? Sure. But what good is a blog if you can’t be irresponsible once in a while?
Anyway, apparently all the tracking polls are suggesting that Obama got a convention bounce, and this morning Sam Wang posted his latest campaign meta-analysis, the first that incorporates post-DNC polls. (I’ve added the labels in red, so don’t blame Sam for that stuff. It’s just my interpretation.) It looks to me like Romney did indeed get an anti-bounce from his convention. I put Obama’s baseline at 300 EV before the convention and 309 EV after the convention. That’s an anti-bounce of -9 EV for Romney. Conversely, Obama has jumped from 309 before the DNC to 320 as of Monday morning. By the end of the week the dust should have cleared and we’ll have a better idea of whether this holds up and what the new baseline is. But early returns sure suggest that the RNC was a bust and the DNC was a hit. Either that or the press corps and the electorate are finally waking up to just how comically deceptive and calculatedly nebulous the Romney/Ryan campaign is. I guess it could be either one.