Some good news for the Romney campaign this morning. Mitt Romney hasn’t even made his convention speech yet, and he’s already seeing a small bump in the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll:
Republican Mitt Romney pulled even with President Barack Obama in a Reuters/Ipsos poll on Wednesday, getting a boost from his party’s nominating convention in Tampa this week.
In a four-day rolling poll, Romney and Obama were deadlocked among likely voters at 43 percent each. That was an improvement for Romney from Obama’s two-point lead on Tuesday and four-point lead on Monday.
“There is movement toward Romney, which is traditional for a convention,” Ipsos pollster Julia Clark said. “It’s small and the change is incremental, but it’s been moving the last couple of days.”
There was concern that Hurricane Isaac and the Todd Akin incident would overshadow the convention, but we haven’t seen that happen. While Romney isn’t expected to get a major bounce from this week, he already appears to be on par with candidates from previous years. Nate Silver writes that the benchmark for a convention bounce is around 4 points, and Romney is already there (at least in the Reuters poll), with one big day left to go.
I wouldn't put too much stock in it. McCain ran a terrible campaign overall, but he handled the convention well and was leading for a bit after the election, until the financial crisis. nEven if Romney had no bounce I'd expect him to win because n1) Obama has no record to run on and n2) consequently, force to run a negative campaign he damages the aura that helped propel him to the presidency in 2008.