So much for Donald Trump’s big bounce
Presidential nominees – particularly if they’re behind to begin with – always count on getting a big bounce coming out of their convention. Even though Donald Trump’s 2020 Republican National Convention was an ineffective slop pile with low TV ratings, there was still a narrative out there about how Trump would certainly get a bounce in the polls from it.
Here’s the thing: we can now almost definitively say that it didn’t happen. The post-convention polling data is still rolling in, but the trend is clear. Biden went up two points in the Economist poll. Biden went up one point in the IBD poll. Biden went down three points in The Hill poll. Biden went up four points in the CNN poll, and so on.
When you plug all the new polls into the average, Joe Biden still has the same roughly eight point lead over Trump that he had before the conventions, which has been fairly consistent all year. This means that Trump failed to win over anyone with his convention, which in turns means his convention was about as ineffective as Palmer Report predicted. When you’re as far behind as Trump is, you can’t simply pander to your existing base.
Joe Biden is firmly winning, and Donald Trump is running out of time. That’s just a factual reality, no matter how many pundits or chicken littles might insist otherwise. Of course no lead is necessarily safe in this era, so now is the time to double down on voter registration, campaign volunteering, phone banking, and polling place volunteering. Let’s go win this!
