McCain’s convention bounce

With John McCain now tied with or leading Barack Obama in a slate of weekend national polls, said Nate Silver in The New Republic’s The Plank blog, it’s safe to say “the GOP had a successful convention.” And McCain’s post-convention bounce will probably “get bigger before it gets smaller.” But we’re in unprecedented territory here, and this could either be a “dead cat bounce” for McCain or a sign of a “new equilibrium” in the race.

McCain’s dramatic bounce is “far more demoralizing” for Democrats than most post-convention bumps, said John Podhoretz in Commentary’s Contentions blog, because “the wild-card addition of Sarah Palin has mixed up everybody’s expectations.” Democrats don’t understand “the deep nature of her appeal,” so they don’t know how to react.

The polling shift has been impressive, said Joe Gandelman in The Moderate Voice blog, but not as big as the “shift in the always all-knowing conventional wisdom comprised of pundits.” After the GOP convention, analysts from across the political spectrum now see this as a “base-mobilization election” that McCain could win.