Willard's Bounce

We’re reaching the point of diminishing returns in analyzing Mitt Romney’s convention bounce. But we can say two things almost for certain. First, Mr. Romney very probably got a bounce. And second, it’s a below-average bounce by historical standards.

What’s trickier to figure out is whether the bounce failed to live up to reasonable expectations, in a way that ought to reduce the odds we’d assign to Mr. Romney winning the election in November.

First, let’s try a simple way of measuring the bounce. In the table below, I’ve included every poll that has been released since Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech last Thursday which also released a preconvention baseline for comparison.

There is some noise in this data: Mr. Romney gets everything from a seven-point bounce (in a Public Policy Polling survey of Michigan) to what technically is an “anti-bounce” of negative two points (in the Gallup national tracking poll). But if you just average the polls together, it comes out to a three-point gain.

Nate Silver