About 3 weeks ago I posted a diary entitled "Paul Ryan to be announced: Why this is dumb". In it I wrote:
This move is both desperate, and completely misunderstands the type of campaign challengers need to run to win.
Dumb.
The Romney people appear to not have learned from history. Choosing a nominees this far out from the GOP convention is likely to end the drama about that convention.
What I failed to see was just how dumb it was. I wrote several pieces at openleft in 2008 about convention bounces. What I wrote was that the VP choice for a challenger was probably more important than the convention itself. This was based on some analysis I had done of the Gore, Kemp and Lieberman nominations.
So here is that data of previous nominations:
As I wrote in the first diary, 2004 provides a cautionary tale. Edwards produced a bounce, but it receded by the time of the Democratic Convention, and as a result the Democrats got no bounce out of the nomination and the Convention.
So what happened this time:
There is some evidence that Ryan helped initially. But the results of 5 polls from pre-Ryan to post Ryan are really stunning: the GOP has not gotten any bounce at all.
(I should note here that bounce comparisons are much better done by comparing pre and post convention data from the same pollster).
What does this mean? Let's look at the data again:
Any Obama bounce is likely to result in a substantial lead. And as the table below shows, the leader in early September is VERY likely to win. There a few big moments in any election. Moments that offer an enormous opportunity for the candidate. The data is overwhelming that the GOP has blown theirs.
It is damn near impossible to overstate the significance of this. There are miles to go before election night, and perhaps the electorate is so polarized that you don't get bounces from conventions.
But the press is severely understating what has happened here.
Note - Carter's lead on labor day in 1980 was due to the end of the Democratic Convention. It reversed very quickly.
Note: my twitter address is dcg1114.