Yesterday I wrote about the selection of Biden by Obama. One of the things I wrote about that between the internal contradictions of the Obama-Biden ticket, the capability of Biden to open his mouth and insert his foot, the ‘safe’ pick not being a game changing pick and the middle of the night/saturday morning cartoons timing all added up to a minimization of any bounce. I even predicted that any bounce would be gone by Sunday night.
So now it is Sunday night and the prediction comes true. The article is written with the best Obama spin that the media can muster given the numbers, but no amount of spin will shake off that this is not good news for Obama.
In a poll taken entirely after the Biden announcement, McCain and Obama are tied at 47%. Given the political headwinds against the GOP this election year, that is an incredibly strong position for McCain to be in. Compared to the generic congressional number, that has McCain up by 10 points compared to a generic republican vs democrat race.
But the lack of a Biden bounce is more than that. The same poll is showing a 4 point decline for Obama and a 3 point increase for McCain from a month ago. The internals of the poll show that if McCain were to make a game changing move in his VP selection, he could land an interesting portion of the Clinton supporters. Right now he is getting about 27 percent of the Clinton supporters. That is about 5 million votes based on the 18 million primary voters Clinton garnered. That’s larger than the Bush margin of victory over Kerry. So a game changing VP selection could potentially lock in those votes from drifting back to their democratic base.
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August 25th, 2008 at 9:32
Ya know, if this were McCain we were talking about the phrase that would be on the press’s lips would be ‘dead cat bounce’…