Palin Deflates Obama’s Bounce

Adan Duran

News

Last updated: Jul 31, 2020 | Sep 01, 2008

Presidential nominees typically get a bounce out of successful conventions, and Sen. Barack Obama’s performance was a hit by any metric. (More on that later.) After a busy weekend, however, national polling shows that Obama got no bounce at all. Gallup:

None. Zip. Zero. Remember, the Democratic National Convention broke several records for overall viewers. Day Two drew five times the ratings of the same day in 2004. Day Four, Obama’s address, shattered convention records, topping ratings for “American Idol,” the most-watched night of the Olympics and the Oscars. (The Oscars!) The speech thrilled delegates and was heralded across the spectrum — including this striking praise from conservative Pat Buchanan. If the story ended there, Obama would have surely netted some increase in the polls.

Before the Mile High Speech sunk in at all, however, the McCain campaign dropped its bombshell news about Gov. Sarah Palin. People were shocked, riveted, excited and disconcerted. They were not thinking about Obama anymore. CNN’s new poll, like Gallup, shows no bounce for Obama. CNN Polling Director Keating Holland explains that there were two bounces — or maybe none:

Now, maybe you’d like a slightly more definitive analysis from the person in charge of the poll, but Holland is candidly noting that tracking polls are inexact and the non-bounce is hard to read. If by “opposite bounces,” however, he means that an equal number of supporters of each candidate switched places, that’s the less likely explanation. More likely, the undecideds and soft conservatives — who might have been temporarily swayed by Obama’s big night — stopped in their tracks with the Palin news. That’s discouraging, naturally, for all those people who reflexively assume that Palin is hurting McCain. Take The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, who emphasizes that undecided voters claim they dislike the pick:

So they say. But survey interviews are a “performance of an ideal self,” as the writer Alexander Provin explains so perfectly in a review of pollster John Zogby’s new book. People may not want to admit — to themselves, let alone pollsters — that the running mate affects their vote, or that the simple addition of a woman to the GOP ticket is making them give McCain a second look. Most say the pick is irrelevant (49 percent) or bad (31 percent). Meanwhile, in the aggregate, the same voters appear to be sticking by McCain, defying the usual trends, after Obama’s tremendously successful convention.