President Obama picked up a modest post-convention polling bump yesterday, but experts don’t expect it to last.
Three separate polls showed Obama making slight gains in the wake of last week’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC, with Rasmussen’s tracking poll revealing a 2 percentage-point lead — Obama 46, Romney 44.
Last week, the same poll had Romney up 47 to 44.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll also put Obama ahead of Romney, 47 to 43.
And Gallup gave Obama an even bigger lead, putting him over Romney 49 percent to 45 percent. The same poll had Obama leading by only a point two weeks ago.
“Convention bounces almost always disappear,” said Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. “By the end of September, we’ll be back to where we were, which is in a very close race.”
Sabato described the post-convention bumps that Obama and Romney received as relatively small compared to others in the last several decades.
A more important factor in the race will be jobs reports — one of which was just released Friday. Another is due four days before the election, Sabato said.
Obama is hurt by Americans’ disappointment with the employment numbers.
The national economy and the federal budget deficit are heading in the wrong direction, according to 72 percent of voters questioned in the Reuters/Ipsos poll.
And 68 percent of voters expressed similar views on the job picture. Those numbers bode well for Republicans — and will help them right up to Election Day, Sabato said.
Much of the newest polling was done before Friday’s grim jobs report, which found that the economy produced a mere 96,000 jobs in August — and that 368,000 frustrated work seekers had simply quit looking.
Mitt Romney seized on the jobs report while stumping in Virginia yesterday.
“For every one new job that was created last month, four workers dropped out of the work force,” Romney said. “This week has not been a week of good news.”
He also bashed Obama for planning to cut military spending, which he said would lead to between 100,000 and 200,000 lost jobs in Virginia alone.
Internal polls show the race is deadlocked in Virginia, a state strategists say Romney has to win if he wants to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to put him in the Oval Office.
Obama told supporters at a campaign event in Florida not to give up.
“When our opponents say this nation is in decline, they’re dead wrong,” he said.
Despite Americans’ disappointment with the economy, Obama increased his lead over Romney in several favorability categories in the Reuters/Ipsos poll. Asked who was more “eloquent,” 50 percent of voters picked Obama, compared to 25 percent for Romney.
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