Here's what I think it's safe to conclude: the GOP had a successful
convention. John McCain now holds a 3-point lead over Barack Obama in
the Gallup daily tracking poll, his largest lead since May. And Rasmussen shows the race tied at 48-48, after having shown Barack Obama with a 5-6 point lead at the peak of his convention bounce.
We will have to see how the other polls weigh in. More
critically, we will have to see what the new state-level electoral
landscape looks like. Since John McCain's daily results seem to be
improving over the course of the tracking window, by the way, we should
probably expect this bounce to get bigger before it gets smaller.
Still,
we just don't know in what direction the polls are going to move from
here forward. There just isn't any precedent for so many political
molecules being packed into such a tight space, with the conventions
and VP selections having come right on top of one another. If one
assumes that the Republicans are getting a typical 6 or 7-point
convention bounce, that suggests that the race still probably leans by
a a couple of points to Barack Obama once the polls return to
equilibrium, the current numbers representing some sort of short-lived,
dead cat bounce
along the lines of what happened to Walter Mondale in 1984. If, on the
other hand, one assumes that both parties have had their say and that
these polls already represent the new equilibrium, things are looking
up for McCain-Palin. The truth, of course, is most likely somewhere in
between. Our tracking graph still regards Barack Obama as roughly a
3-point favorite, but it is designed to respond cautiously to new
information. If McCain sustains these numbers over the course of the
next week or so, it will shift toward him relatively rapidly.
--Nate Silver