Gallup: McCain Leads By 2
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, Biden, Democrats, Independents, McCain, PollsAnd so the tables have turned, at least for today. Of note, Obama hasn’t been at 44% for a LONG time. In fact, the last time was before he secured the nomination back in early June. The same goes for McCain, who hasn’t reached 46% since the same time period.
My guess as to why? The Hillary voters have started to jump to McCain because of the Biden announcement. And all it takes is just a few % swing here and there to swing this election. So if this is tight, not picking Hillary could really cost Obama. Of course, it could have cost him anyway with the amount of anti-Hillary sentiment that exists. But we’ll never know for sure if he does lose.
More perspective from Gallup about the lack of a Biden bounce:
An analysis of historical election poll trends by Gallup Poll Managing Editor Jeff Jones shows that recent presidential campaigns have enjoyed a small (though short-lived) bounce from the running mate announcement. This includes a four percentage point bounce for John Kerry in 2004 after selecting John Edwards, a 5-point bounce for Al Gore in 2000 with his announcement of Joe Lieberman, and a 3-point bounce for George W. Bush in 2000 upon choosing Dick Cheney. Bob Dole received an extraordinary 9-point bounce in 1996 after bringing Jack Kemp onto his ticket.All of these bounces occurred before the respective party’s convention began, and in most cases the candidates received an additional boost in the polls upon completion of the convention. Thus, any increase in Obama’s support in the coming days would seem to be more the result of the star-studded and well publicized Democratic national convention than the apparently lackluster Biden selection.
More tomorrow…
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, Biden, Democrats, Independents, McCain, Polls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Meh, Hillary supporters are sore losers, and are willing to cut off their own nose to spite the dem party, and by doing so are dooming any chance of Hillary ever winning the presidency
August 26th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
[...] finally, I think Justin Gardner is on to something when he attributes the latest poll movements to Hillary Clinton supporters who are upset that Obama … The Hillary voters have started to jump to McCain because of the Biden announcement. And all it [...]
August 26th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I said that these polls are meaningless when Obama was up by 6, and I still think they are meaningless with McCain up by two. The first poll worth paying attention to will be the week after both conventions are over. At that point, the majority of American voters have started to pay attention.
August 26th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
What mw said, though I’d add the caveat that the polls DO reflect some basal shifts in key demographics at this point, and that’s worth paying attention to. But what they aren’t is all that terribly predictive of November. A couple of months is a lifetime in election season.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I’ll go further and say that McCain will probably get a significant bounce from his convention, while Obama gets very little from his. As you can see, the press is spending so much time covering the supposed Hillary-Obama rift, PUMAs, etc. it’s going to be impossible for Obama to really derive much benefit. The press just can’t stay away from the Clintons, even though by all accounts it is a very small minority of attendees.
What will prove the media is in the bag for McCain is when they completely ignore a much larger gathering at Ron Paul’s shadow convention in Minneapolis.
But I’m still not worried. Instant polling has removed the trends that everyone keeps insisting spell doom for Obama. The polls will be close throughout and the Dems GOTV will blow the GOP out of the water.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Here’s what Nate at FiveThirtyEight said about today’s nationals:
“This tracking polling will NOT reflect any convention bounce (or its absence). These polling firms conclude their interviews by mid-evening, before Michelle Obama’s speech and before network coverage of the convention began. So if there is a response to the events of Monday night, it will show up in the field on Tuesday, which means that it will be reflected in polls released on Wednesday. Moreover, our research has concluded that there typically is not any bounce until the third day of the convention. As such, this polling tells us nothing at all about the convention so far.
“It might tell us something about Joe Biden. I tend to agree with the conventional wisdom that there was liable to be a bit of a near-term backlash whenever Obama announced his VP choice, provided that the VP was not Hillary Clinton. The key phrase in there, however, is “near-term”. If Hillary is able to rally her supporters to the Obama-Biden ticket tonight, there could still be a latent/lagged VP bounce for Obama that gets rolled up into his convention bounce.”
August 27th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Obama’s decision to not choose Hillary shows how insecure he really is, how much savvy he does not have and his huge dissregard for the Democratic party’s chance of winning….He is not quite ready for Prime Time. He will loose and fizzle away. Too bad for black people. And they tell me that they are concernred this might happen. But i guess everyone can be happy a black person finaly got nominated. But then that just goes to show that that’s about all they wanted…reguardless of how qualified the candidate is. Obama/Clinton would have the Republicans shaking in their boots. Biden/Obama is easily beatable. My biggest surprise is that most of my Jewish friends are voting McCain!????