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Gallup polling suggests RNC did nothing for Romney

September 3, 2012 | 1:55 pm
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It’s still too early to say for sure whether the Republican National Convention rejuvenated Mitt Romney’s campaign, but at least according to Gallup numbers so far, it hasn’t moved the polls much.

Romney currently trails President Obama by an insignificant one-point margin, 47 percent to 46 percent. That’s a 7-day tracking poll running from last Monday through yesterday and therefore includes a full three days of polling after Romney’s Thursday night acceptance speech. If he were to have received a substantial bump, the tracking poll would have likely picked it up by now. In the last poll before the start of the RNC, running through last Monday, it was Romney who was edging out Obama by one point.

The evidence from the tracking poll that Romney received no bounce is also backed up by  a three-day Gallup survey following the RNC, which found that while 40 percent of Americans said they were more likely to vote for Romney after his speech, 38 percent said they were less likely and it made no difference to 22 percent.

Frank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup blogs that, “We’ll know a little more when we report our seven-day average on Tuesday,September 4, which will contain include four days after Romney’s speech on Thursday. After that point, any impact of the GOP convention will begin to be co-mingled with the impact of the Democratic convention. That’s why the ultimate reckoning will be what the election landscape looks like after both conventions.”

It’s hard to say, in other words, whether Romney’s message just isn’t resonating, or that we’ve entered an era in politics in which swing voters have largely begun to tune out conventions.

In more favorable news for Romney, Rasmussen’s tracking poll has detected a “modest bounce,” and finds him leading Obama by four points.

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