Romney Receives Smallest Convention Bump Ever

[Veras]

Gallup has been keeping track of the metric since 1984.  They perform a poll asking if what the respondent saw at the convention would make them more or less likely to vote for that party's candidate for President.  The impact of the convention is measured by subtracting the number of people who say "less likely" from the number of people who say "more likely".

Romney's result?  40% say they're more likely, 38% say they're less likely for a net impact of +2.  It was +77 among Republicans, -65 among Democrats, and (most importantly) +3 among independents.



This bodes well for Obama.  As the challenger, Romney is not as well-known, and he should have had the opportunity to win a lot of people over at the convention.

I do have to question how accurate this is as a way of measuring the convention bump.  For starters, "more" or "less" likely to vote for him does not mean "likely" or "unlikely" to vote for him.  After all, Bush only had a net impact of +3 in 2004 and he won, while Dukakis had a net impact of +35 in 1988 and he was obliterated 426-111 in the Electoral College.  I'm far more interested to see the new polls that come out over the next week.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/157256/gop-convention-romney-speech-evoke-lukewarm-reactions.aspx

[Distind]

With the bush number you have to remember how hard he was wailing on the love it or leave it bit. If you weren't going to vote for him, you weren't going to change you mind. The 2001 war president and all. Plus Kerry was a complete tool.

I must say the clinton bump back in 92 is amazing. It'll be interesting to see the stats for the DNC this year once they get them together.

[nickiknack]

With the 1988 election, you forget about the whole Willie Horton bs ads started to run in the fall, so....

[R. U. Sirius]

Something that's always confused me...

Given that most states have no laws requiring their electoral college to follow the popular vote, and there have been historic instances of the electoral college going AGAINST the popular vote, doesn't the electoral college system basically render the popular vote meaningless?

I understand that it was initially set up to avoid a tyranny of the majority, but I fail to see how that's an improvement over such a thing.

[agentCDE]

Yeah, I never really liked the electoral college system either, even when I was a kid first learning about it in history class.

I'm kind've holding my breath to see what President Obama's post-convention bump is going to be like, but I get the feeling it'll be decent.

[Veras]

With the 1988 election, you forget about the whole Willie Horton bs ads started to run in the fall, so....

That was just an instance of the polls changing over time, which shows that the convention bump itself didn't much matter.

My criticism is of this methodology as a way of measuring the bump, because somebody who went from being completely undecided to being a hardcore Romney supporter would be measured in the exact same way as somebody who was leaning toward Obama who became entirely undecided.  In the polls, however, the former would be an extra point for Romney while the latter would be an undecided before and after.

You're right, quoting those two instances does not necessarily support my point, but it doesn't undermine it either.  I can't find week-to-week tracking polls for 1988, so I'm not sure how big the actual bump in the polls was, how far ahead/behind Dukakis was going into the convention, and how much support he lost between the DNC and Election Day.

Something that's always confused me...

Given that most states have no laws requiring their electoral college to follow the popular vote, and there have been historic instances of the electoral college going AGAINST the popular vote, doesn't the electoral college system basically render the popular vote meaningless?

I understand that it was initially set up to avoid a tyranny of the majority, but I fail to see how that's an improvement over such a thing.

Faithless electors--members of the Electoral College who do not vote the way that the are supposed to--are relatively rare.  Four times (1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000), one candidate has won the popular vote and lost the electoral vote, but (with the possible exception of 1876, that's up for debate) it wasn't because the electors of a state did not follow the will of the voters of their state.

That being said, I would like to see the Electoral College reformed.  Nebraska and Maine use a system that I find to be far superior to the one used by the other 48 states.  Each state gets a number of electoral votes equal to their number of members of the House plus two for the Senators.  In every state but those two, it's winner take all--if you win California by one vote, you get all 55 Electors.  In NE and ME, each congressional district gets to determine its own electoral vote, and the winner of the state as a whole gets the two remaining votes.  In 2008 McCain won Nebraska, but the Electors were split 4-1 because Obama won the district around Lincoln.

Of course, I can't really justify why we should amend the Constitution to make this change and not just abolish it altogether, except to say that, as a political scientist, the Electoral College is very fun to study.  As a citizen, I would like to see it go, especially given that the system favors the Republicans.

[Old Viking]

Sales of chairs went up.

[erictheblue]

That being said, I would like to see the Electoral College reformed.  Nebraska and Maine use a system that I find to be far superior to the one used by the other 48 states.  Each state gets a number of electoral votes equal to their number of members of the House plus two for the Senators.  In every state but those two, it's winner take all--if you win California by one vote, you get all 55 Electors.  In NE and ME, each congressional district gets to determine its own electoral vote, and the winner of the state as a whole gets the two remaining votes.

Some states (not sure which ones, though I believe MD is one) have passed laws that would automatically allocate their electorial votes to the winner of the popular vote, regardless of who actually won that state. The laws are written to not go into effect until enough states to make an electorial majority pass such laws.

[StallChaser]

Politics was local when the Constitution was written, because there wasn't the mass communication we have now.  The average person didn't know very much about presidential politics, so the electoral college was a way for people to vote for electors they trusted to make a good decision.  That's not the case any more.  It's actually the reverse, where we know the presidential candidates and have no idea who the electors are.  Too many people want to keep it this way because "that's the way it has always been".  That, and because a lot of people owe their position in politics to the way things are set up now*.

National popular vote is our best chance of changing it.  Individual states can decide for themselves how to choose electors (The Constitution says nothing about how states have to assign them), so it can be done without an amendment (that would easily be blocked by smaller states).


*The same could be said for campaign finance reform.  Politicians don't like the current lobbying system, but the current system has worked for them (they're in power), so they're not going to change it.