Bounce.
Good news for the White House, although we’ll have to wait until later this week to see if this is part of a trend captured by other pollsters or an outlier. Despite the endless soft-focus testimonials at the convention about what a swell guy Trump is, Morning Consult says his favorable rating didn’t improve at all. He’s at 43/55, same as last week. It’s probably a fool’s errand at this point trying to convince people who don’t like him after three and a half years to rethink their opinion. What the convention did succeed at doing is getting people to like Biden less: He went from 51/46 favorability last weekend to 49/47 now. Trump’s gains came among white voters and suburbanites, cutting a 14-point Biden lead among the latter group to eight. We can only speculate which convention message, specifically, resonated with them but an obvious possibility is the idea that America will see more violent unrest under a Biden presidency than it’s seeing now. In fact, it’s possible that the news from Kenosha is what moved the numbers towards Trump here, entirely apart from the convention itself. Maybe he would have gained on the Democrat even if Republicans hadn’t been on TV this week. Any post-convention bounce is a step in the right direction for him. But: Being 6 points behind after your own convention is terrible news. It’s worse than McCain in 2008 or Romney in 2012. Its probably worse than Carter after the 1980 Democratic convention (which was not considered a very happy event at the time) but I would have to look that up. Peter Spiliakos (@petespiliakos) August 29, 2020 The sign of progress that Republicans are desperate to see is Biden consistently below 50 percent in polling. That would mean that some people who are in his corner right now have switched back to undecided. As it is, the Democrat’s at 49-50 percent or better in most surveys, which makes it hard to imagine a series of narrow Trump wins in battleground states again. When he beat Hillary four years ago, she led him 48/46 in the national popular vote with third-party candidates chipping away at her margins. Biden’s ceiling is higher than that, and he won’t have to worry about independents. This point is also worth bearing in mind. If Trump is -6 after days of a carefully stage-managed production on national TV aimed at making him seem cuddly, even-keeled, and hyper-competent, where will he be after he spends the next week reminding voters yet again that he’s not that guy at all? The GOP convention folks did an effective job keeping the president filtered and on teleprompter.
