Michael Dukakis bounded out of the Democratic National Convention in 1988 with a 17 percentage-point advantage over George H.W. Bush in the Gallup Poll. Dukakis lost the presidential election months later by nearly eight points.
He wasn’t the last nominee to score a better “bounce”— a boost in polling that candidates generally enjoy coming out of a week of national TV coverage of their conventions — than his rival received, yet then go on to lose the election. Like Barry Goldwater and Walter Mondale before him, and Bob Dole and Al Gore afterward, the nominee riding a big summer wave crashed in the fall.
And since 2000, post-convention bounces have not only trended lower — averaging just under 2.5 percent for candidates of both major parties. They’ve also tended to be negated by back-to-back conventions canceling out advantages.
As some of the first public national polling in the aftermath of the 2016 Republican National Convention portrays a better-than-average bounce for nominee Donald Trump, the Democrats are taking their own stage in Philadelphia.
Trump held a 3 percentage-point advantage over Clinton — 48-45 percent — in a CNN/ORC survey of registered voters conducted three days after his convention, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. That’s a 10-point shift from Clinton’s 7-point lead in a CNN/ORC survey days before the convention, when she led by 49-42.
At the same time, a CBS News poll conducted since the Republican convention shows a 42-42 tie between Trump and Clinton in a two-way match — they also were tied 40-40 in a CBS News/New York Times poll before the convention.
Another daily tracking survey running through and after the Republican convention, conducted by the Los Angeles Times and University of Southern California, shows Trump with a 4-point edge over Clinton July 18-24.
Just before the conventions, Clinton held an average 3.2 percentage-point advantage in polls tracked by RealClearPolitics. With post-GOP convention polling starting to arrive, her average advantage has slipped to 0.2 percent.
InsideSources/NH Journal will be releasing a poll tomorrow morning showing gains for Trump in New Hampshire.
“Have you seen the polls that just came out? We had like the biggest bounce that anyone can remember,” Trump said at a town hall event in Roanoke, Virginia, on Monday. “We’re actually leading in the polls,” he said, noting: “The big poll, that’s Nov. 8, that’s the poll we care about.”
The bigger question for Trump and Clinton, however, will be the impression the conventions leave on voters still waiting to be convinced about either of the two.
And for Trump, in a party whose own divisions were underscored by Sen. Ted Cruz’s call to “vote your conscience,” and an acceptance speech about a nation “in crisis” that was widely characterized in the media as “dark,” experts say it will be a question of the impression made on a couple of key demographic groups in this election contest: independent voters and suburban women.
“If there is going to be a bounce, it will be among the Republicans who are withholding support,’’ says Linda Fowler, professor of government at Dartmouth College. “It will mostly come from disaffected Republicans who will say it wasn’t all bad and, ‘I guess we’re getting used to this guy.’ But in terms of the key undecided demographic, there was nothing there for women in that speech, and those are people who needed to be brought over.”
Conventions, “are supposed to be uplifting,” Fowler says.
“On the one hand, there was a convention and there were some good moments,” she says. “On the other hand, with the independent women who are withholding judgment, with the nasty tone and the shouting, I can’t imagine that women who are undecided about Trump are going to find a reason to support his candidacy.”
At the same time, Clinton cannot automatically claim independent voters or Republican women who remain wary of Trump: “The problem for Hillary is, a lot of people don’t trust her, and to me that’s the challenge for her in this convention. It’s not just to have it be all warm and gauzy and, ‘Aren’t we a wonderful party about to make history?’ Her problem is, she’s got trust problems.”
More than two-thirds of voters surveyed by CNN say Clinton is not honest and trustworthy. Trump’s honesty rating in the survey has marginally improved from 38 percent before his convention to 43 percent afterward.
The boost for Trump in the LA Times/USC survey has come with gains among white voters, particularly men. Among white voters without college degrees, in the newest CNN survey, Trump’s lead has grown from 51-31 percent to 62-23.
In a four-way matchup, including Libertarian Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein, Trump stood 44-39 against Clinton in the CNN/ORC poll. He made his gains largely among independent voters, support growing from 34 to 43 percent.
Some 30 million Americans watched Trump accept his party’s nomination, roughly the same number who watched Mitt Romney accept his in 2012 — and short of the 40 million who viewed Sen. John McCain’s acceptance speech in 2008.
Like voters in general, viewers congregated in familiar camps. More than a third of Trump’s audience, 12 million, was spread across the broadcast networks, according to Nielsen Media. Fox News followers led cable audiences with its 9.4 million viewers. CNN, which Trump has taken to calling “the Clinton News Network, topped each of the broadcasters, with 5.5 million. MSNBC drew 3 million.
All this coverage cannot help but have an impact on public opinion polling. Yet FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver notes that “these bounces can be short-lived and aren’t always predictive.”
The Democratic convention opens this week in its own disarray: Party Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigning at convention’s end, is being denied appearances there due to revelations that she engaged in email traffic suggesting ways the party could thwart the threat Sen. Bernie Sanders once posed to Clinton.
Yet Clinton will have other boosters. President Barack Obama, his own job approval ratings running positive, will address the convention on the eve of Clinton’s speech, as will billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who first was elected New York City mayor as a Republican and later became an independent.
Still, whoever bounces highest after these conventions, the lift may not last long.
Silver has tracked the shrinking bounces candidates have claimed from conventions — comparing a full week of post-convention polling with surveys two weeks prior. From 1964 through 1980, they averaged 6.9 percent. In the 1980s and 90s, they ran 6.2 percent. Since 2000, they have averaged just 2.4 percent.
“The key for both candidates is to have a smoothly run convention that heals rather than exacerbates existing party wounds and projects a positive message to the rest of the country,” he writes. So far, the parties are zero for two on that count.
