REASON TO CELEBRATE: Convention, Clinton gave Obama poll bump.

  • REASON TO CELEBRATE: Convention, Clinton gave Obama poll bump.

Analyst Nate Silver writes that it’s now clear Barack Obama is enjoying a bounce in the polls from the Democratic National Convention.

Advertisement

Mr. Obama had another strong day in the polls on Saturday, making further gains in each of four national tracking polls. The question now is not whether Mr. Obama will get a bounce in the polls, but how substantial it will be.

Some of the data, in fact, suggests that the conventions may have changed the composition of the race, making Mr. Obama a reasonably clear favorite as we enter the stretch run of the campaign.

And for an answer to a question of local interest, my emphasis supplied:

That Mr. Obama has made these gains in polls that only partially reflect the Democratic convention suggests that his bounce could be more substantial once they fully do so. Mathematically, Mr. Obama has to have been running well ahead of Mr. Romney in the most recent interviews in these surveys to have made up for middling data earlier in the week.

In fact, it is possible to reverse-engineer an estimate of what Mr. Obama’s numbers look like in the postconvention part of the tracking surveys. Specifically, I will be looking to infer Mr. Obama’s numbers from interviews conducted after Bill Clinton’s speech on Wednesday night, which in my view was the pivotal moment of the convention.

Be a part of something bigger

As a reader of the Arkansas Times, you know we’re dedicated to bringing you tough, determined, and feisty journalism that holds the powerful accountable. For 50 years, we've been fighting the good fight in Little Rock and beyond – with your support, we can do even more. By becoming a subscriber or donating as little as $1 to our efforts, you'll not only have access to all of our articles, but you'll also be helping us hire more writers to expand our coverage and continue to bring important stories to light. With over 63,000 Facebook followers, 58,000 Twitter followers, 35,000 Arkansas blog followers, and 70,000 daily email blasts, it's clear that our readers value our great journalism. Join us in the fight for truth.

Previous article Fighting for partisan control of the Arkansas legislature Next article An extra day of life? On the useless gifts’s from animal organizations