Burnt Orange Report

The Bounce is Over

By Byron LaMasters

Or at least it's begining to look like it. Two new polls out today:

The Pew Poll:

The GOP convention gave President Bush a double-digit lead, but the race has settled into a virtual tie with voters still worried about the economy and Iraq, according to polling by the Pew Research Center.

The first of two national polls by Pew, done Sept. 8-10, reflected the president's post-convention bounce. Bush was ahead of Democrat John Kerry 52-40 among registered voters and by an even wider margin, 54-39, among likely voters, a narrower group.

By the second poll, done Sept. 11-14, the Bush lead had evaporated. In that poll, Bush and Kerry were knotted at 46 percent among registered voters. Among likely voters, Bush was at 47 percent and Kerry at 46 percent.

And the Harris Poll:

The latest Harris Poll finds that Senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush are now enjoying almost equal levels of support. Immediately after the Republican convention in New York, several polls showed President Bush jumping ahead of Senator Kerry with a clear lead of between six and 11 percentage points. This "convention bounce" has now disappeared.

These are some of the results of a nationwide poll of 1,018 U.S. adults surveyed by telephone by Harris Interactive(R) between September 9 and 13, 2004. It seems that the short-term effects of the Republican convention have worn off. The poll shows Senator Kerry leading 48 percent to 47 percent among likely voters.

[...]

One reason that President Bush is no longer ahead is that a slender 51 percent to 45 percent majority does not believe that he deserves to be re-elected.

Hopefully, this trend will continue, but it'll be a few days before we have a good idea of whether Bush still has a small lead or if the race is dead even. Of course, I've heard from a few sources that tomorrow's Gallup poll will show Bush with a significant lead, so things might just be all over the place.