Sunday, August 03, 2008
Opinion
Obama's trip bounce
By Arianna Huffington
Isn't it strange that Barack Obama didn't get a bounce from his wildly well-received overseas trip?
By July 23, four days before the end of the trip, U.S. News and World Report's Michael Barone had seen enough to render his bounce-analysis: "The assumption among most observers seems to be that Barack Obama will get a bounce in the polls from his trip to Afghanistan and Iraq, the Middle East and Western Europe. But it's not apparent in the polls that have come in to date."
He doesn't say who the "most observers" are that made this "assumption." And while he cites several polls and lets us know that he puts "more weight on the Rasmussen poll," he doesn't say why. Perhaps he likes that Rasmussen polls "likely voters" while others, such as Gallup, poll "registered voters." He does, however, advise: "Stay tuned. I don't think the voters' decision-making process is complete yet." I'll make a note of that.
Fox News' poll, meanwhile, taken over the two days Obama was in Jordan and Israel, revealed that "the significant news coverage Barack Obama is receiving on his foreign trip has not translated into a bounce in his numbers." You can hear their disappointment in every word, can't you? This lack of bounce translation (perhaps it was done by Maliki's interpreter) was based on 900 registered voters willing to answer the phone and talk to Fox's pollsters "in the evening."
Over at Time, also four days before the trip was over, Joe Klein bypassed the question of whether Obama did or didn't get a bounce—why bother? It had already been decided by the conventional wisdom board of directors that he didn’t—and got right down to laying out the theories of why he didn't: "Lots of speculation on the Web, and in whispering circles, about why Obama's foreign trip—a slam-dunk success substantively and in photo-op terms (Obama laughing with Petraeus in the helicopter was the best)—hasn’t resulted in a polling bump. … People may be thinking, what on earth is Obama doing over there when we have so many problems back home? Why isn't he talking about the economy?"
Perfectly reasonable,
if Obama didn't get a bounce. But in two sets of daily tracking polls—Rasmussen and Gallup—taken before Obama's trip started and after the trip actually ended, we see that Rasmussen shows a gain of 5 points for Obama, while Gallup shows a gain of 7. Doesn't that sound like a bounce to you?
SP