The Weekly Standard

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First question: Was there a bounce?



Nate Silver's Saturday analysis of post-DNC polling was probably the scariest thing Team Romney has seen this summer. Silver saw a medium-sized bounce for Obama coming out of Charlotte, in the +3 to +5 range in daily tracking polls. More importantly, because the tracking polls still had some pre-Charlotte data in them, there was a small possibility that Obama could pick up a much more significant bounce—maybe as high as +10 or +11.

Yikes.

Other smart stat-heads weren't so bullish on Obama’s numbers. Some of them pushed back against Silver. My colleague Jay Cost published a very smart bit of number crunching in which he looked at the likely voter numbers averaged over the month of August—both nationally and in battleground states—and found Romney to have finished the summer in a very strong position, just a hair behind Obama.

And yet the post-August numbers so far have been pretty unambiguous: Romney moved very little in the four down days after the Republican convention in Tampa, and Obama jumped about +4 points. In the history of post-convention bounces, this isn’t 1992 (where Bill Clinton was behind George H.W. Bush by 1 point heading into his convention and then 23 points ahead two weeks after), but it's not nothing, either. And if you needed any confirmation that the Obama bounce is real, and potentially important, there’s this: The Romney campaign sent around a memo on Monday morning telling interested parties that the bounce was neither real nor important. As I said, yikes.

The good news is that all bounces dissipate, and Obama's is likely to as well. Yet one of the most interesting characteristics of the Obama-Romney race so far has been how stable it's been. Since November of 2011, the candidates have never been separated by more than 6.1 points. Most of the time, the gap has been closer to 3 points. This suggests that Romney and Obama are fighting a World War I-style battle, with a line of engagement that’s reasonably fixed. On the one hand, this is helpful to Romney because it means that Obama isn’t likely to achieve a breakout, and if the race stays close Romney will have a puncher’s chance no matter what.

But on the other hand, when you're waging trench warfare, every inch of ground is precious.

And so long as we're being gloomy, let's go all the way: Another remarkable characteristic of the race has been Romney's near-total inability to open up any lead on Obama. If you look at the RealClearPolitics polling average since last November, Romney has never led Obama. This is unusual. As Silver points out, we've seen elections in which a dominant incumbent president runs wire-to-wire. Most of the time, both candidates spend some time in the lead. Kerry, McCain, and Dukakis all spent some time as the front-runner. And while Reagan didn't put away Carter until the final weeks of the campaign in 1980, after the Republican convention Reagan was up by 30 points.

And here, finally, is what worries the Romney team in Boston: The evidence suggests that Mitt Romney might have a ceiling of support that even a convention bounce couldn’t break through.


LOOKING BACK


"While the press often considers the Ron Paul movement to be chock-full of cranks, wackos, and conspiracy theorists, I take a more nuanced view. For me, the Ron Paul Revolution is like a cozy winter fire. From a distance, the crackling flames of individual liberty and freethinking libertarianism take the chill off sterile two-party politics. But get too near the searing embers, and they will cause blistering, profuse sweating, and all-around general discomfort."

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