September 09, 2012 05:52 PM UTC

This Is What a "Convention Bounce" Looks Like

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Los Angeles Times confirms analysis from our readers Friday:

President Obama’s post-convention “bounce” continued to grow Saturday, as new polls showed him widening a lead over Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Obama’s lead over Romney among registered voters grew to 49%-45% in Gallup’s tracking poll. The 49% for Obama was his highest point in the survey since late April. It represented an increase of 1 point since Friday and a 5-point swing from Romney’s 47%-46% lead in the Gallup survey just before the Republican convention began.

The poll combines small samples taken each night to present a seven-day average. Since three of the nights of the survey period preceded the Democratic convention, Obama’s lead in the survey is likely to grow further.

You know it’s real when even the famously GOP-leaning pollsters at Rasmussen can’t hide it:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows President Obama attracting support from 49% of voters nationwide, while Mitt Romney earns 45% of the vote. Three percent (3%) prefer some other candidate, and three percent (3%) are undecided…

This is the president’s biggest lead over Romney among Likely Voters since March 17…[t]he president has made significant gains among voters aged 40-64.

The “conventional” wisdom on post-convention bounces is they are just that–a temporary boost, soon brought to earth by the same circumstances that prevailed before the conventions.

Of course, not every convention has matched up Bill Clinton vs. Clint Eastwood, and who knew that Eastwood would be so awful? Nobody could have predicted that. Eastwood, perhaps even more than Paul Ryan’s mendacity, Hurricane Isaac, or the Ron Paul insurgency, did at least as much to break the GOP’s post-convention momentum as any other factor. Eastwood’s “empty chair” has emerged as a defining symbol of a party out of touch, running on a platform of petty and personal antagonism instead of a coherent vision of the future.

That said, what can be done now to stop Obama’s “bounce” from becoming permanent?