Rasmussen has historically been pro-Republican. (link, link, link, link, link, link) And this time they probably overestimated Romney's convention bounce by ... a ton, and now have numbers they can't explain in a Republican friendly way the way they usually do.
Rasmussen, as noted in The Hill on September 2:
A Rasmussen poll released Sunday differs from Reuters and shows Romney holding his convention bounce. The conservative polling outlet found Romney with a four-point lead over Obama, whom he trailed by two points before the convention in the same poll. Rasmussen now shows Romney leading the president with 48 percent support to 44.
A week later from
Rasmussen's site:
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows President Obama attracting support from 49% of voters nationwide, while Mitt Romney earns 45% of the vote.
Obama has gone from down four points to up four points. An
8 point surge.
But that isn't all the polling goodness. Reuters says that Romney lost a point after his convention. Reuters/Ipsos:
Democratic President Barack Obama regained a narrow lead on Saturday by 44 percent to 43 percent over his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Governor Romney, in the latest daily installment of the four-day rolling poll.
Romney was ahead by one point in Friday's online poll and two points in Thursday's survey...
A week later
Reuters had:
The latest daily tracking poll showed Obama, a Democrat, with a lead of 4 percentage points over Romney. Forty-seven percent of 1,457 likely voters surveyed online over the previous four days said they would vote for Obama if the November 6 elections were held today, compared with 43 percent for Romney.
"The bump is actually happening. I know there was some debate whether it would happen... but it's here," said Ipsos pollster Julia Clark, referring to the "bounce" in support that many presidential candidates enjoy after nominating conventions.
Okay, President Obama was down 2 points the Thursday before the DNC convention and is now up 4. That is a 6 point surge and it beats the hell out of Romney's
negative 3. (Romney went from up two on a Thursday to down 1 on Saturday.)
Gallup also showed Romney losing a point, even though they didn't headline it. Gallup:
Support was 47% before convention and 46% after
More
here just to rub it in a little:
Mitt Romney is the first candidate to receive a net negative swing in Gallup's tracking polling since the polling firm started measuring convention "bounces" in 1964.
According to the Gallup results, Romney lost a point of support in the before-and-after measure while President Obama gained a point of support.
Last Friday
Gallup had this:
Obama Bounces Up to 52% Approval, 48% to 45% Over Romney
And then there is today:
Before the RNC convention Obama was down 1 point. Now he is up 4 for a grand total of 5 points in the positive bounce direction.
More from PEC to rub in the negative Romney bounce some more. Princeton Election Consortium:
The negative GOP bounce. As I stated before, the GOP convention was of no help to them in the Electoral College. Indeed, it appears that the race shifted towards President Obama by 6-15 EV, or about 1.0% of Popular Vote Meta-Margin. From an analytical perspective, a negative bounce is quite remarkable because all the talk in recent weeks has been of bounces being smaller or zero, but always in the hosting party’s favor.