A likely small convention bounce for Romney

By Richard K. Barry

As Nate Silver points out, there is a bit of a split verdict on a Romney convention bounce amongst pollsters. As he writes:

My view is that the consensus of evidence so far points toward Mitt Romney having received a small bounce in the polls of perhaps two or three percentage points from the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla.

Oddly enough, however, you can’t really find a poll that seems to reflect a 2- or 3-point bounce exactly. Instead, there have been some polls where Mr. Romney’s bounce has been a bit larger than that, and others where there is little sign of a bounce at all. 

As for those who see no bounce at all, Frank Newport at Gallup writes:

We do have some new data that reinforce the tentative conclusion that the Republican convention did not change the race. The results, from data gathered Friday and Saturday and set to be released on gallup.com Monday morning, show that both the self-reported impact of the GOP convention and evaluations of Romney's speech were at the very low end of the scale compared with the previous years in which we have asked the same questions about other conventions and nominees.

And then Rasmussen and Ipsos show a few point bounce, which means if you average nothing and a few you get a small bump for Mitt.

Move along. Nothing to see here.