It’s hard to say what we should expect in terms of polling gains from the COVID-era, remote nominating conventions over the next few weeks. On one hand, the well-choreographed convention floor “show” will be missing, potentially robbing the both Biden and Trump of whatever benefits there are from the spectacle nature of these sorts of events. At the same time, the candidates are still the beneficiaries of four straight days during which they probably will dominate media coverage, including two-hours of prime-time television coverage each night of the convention. So it may well be that the impact of the conventions in 2020 are not terribly different than in other years. We’ll know more about this in a few weeks.
In the meantime, I thought it would be useful to review the extent to which the convening party candidate receives a bump in the polls following their convention. CONT.
Tom Holbrook (UW-Milwaukee), Politics by the Numbers