Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: It was a dark and stormy night

Above is pollster.com aggregate without Rasmussen and Gallup (Obama 46.4, Romney 45.3 [morning update].) See explanation.

Above is Rasmussen and Gallup alone (Obama 45.9, Romney 46.2 [morning update].) "All polls included" is here.

Note that many pollsters are switching to Likely Voters (LV) but not all have. For the next few weeks, try and match apples to apples and pay attention to Registered Voters (RV) vs Likely Voters (LV) polls. And since everyone uses a different model, the difference will vary (7 points in the recent CNN poll, 1 in the LA Times poll.)

Jonathan Bernstein:

Hey, liberals: prepare now. Barack Obama will likely be losing when the pollsters try again after Mitt Romney closes out the Republican National Convention on Thursday night. He may well be back ahead, however, after his speech at the Democratic National Convention next week. My advice? Take a quick look at the polling averages right now ' Pollster has Obama up by one percentage point ' and then ignore the polling until a full week has passed after the Democratic Convention. By then, we'll start to have a really good sense of what's going on.

We've had a bunch of excellent summaries from political scientists in the last few days of how and why convention bumps happen, and what to expect this time around. We basically see two kinds of movement during the conventions: one temporary, and one permanent.

Nate Silver:

Nine of the 15 polls have President Obama ahead by either one or two percentage points. Three have Mr. Obama ahead by a slightly larger margin, between four and six percentage points. Another three have Mr. Romney ahead, each by a single percentage point.

On average between the 15 surveys, Mr. Obama leads by 1.6 percentage points. While there are some modest differences between them, pretty much every poll is within the margin of error of the others.

Enjoy this moment of relative consensus in the polls; it probably won't last long.

We talked about this yesterday on Kagro in the Morning. Join us today at 9 am ET for more.

Bill Keller:

'We did build that,' has already been established as one of the more dishonest political memes in a campaign season undisturbed by shame. The Republicans took a clumsy phrase from an Obama speech in July, in which the president pointed out that most American business successes have been assisted by infrastructure, education or incentives underwritten by the government. The Republican spin-masters whipped this into a preposterous claim that Obama denied American entrepreneurs any credit for their creations. The fact that this slogan has been thoroughly debunked has not kept it from being the defining theme in Tampa.

Until Tuesday's opening festivities you could call this a particularly egregious example of the familiar political game of ripping things out of context. (As in, 'I like to fire people.') A little distortion.  A bit of oppo jiu-jitsu.

But why stop there? Why not go whole hog and just make stuff up?

Reuters/Ipsos Online Poll:

Romney faces headwinds in race against Obama

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were ahead of Romney and running mate Paul Ryan by 46 percent to 42 percent, according to the online poll. The Obama team led the Republicans by 16 percentage points among independents, a key voting bloc that could tip the election in battleground states.

It was the first installment of a four-day rolling poll by Reuters/Ipsos which will measure and track attitudes during the Republican and Democratic conventions.

Seriously... am I the only person who remembers them touting GWB's business experience in almost identical terms?
' @HunterDK via TweetDeck Politico:

MSNBC's Chris Matthews has doubled down on his charge that the GOP is dividing the United States "along racial lines."

On tonight's edition of MSNBC's Hardball, Matthews repeated an accusation he first made in an interview with POLITICO last night, citing "a long history in American politics... of using welfare to divide voters along racial lines." Later in the program, Matthews cautioned viewers of tonight's GOP convention to "be on the alert for the tribal messages, the war drums of racial division."

In his interview with POLITICO, Matthews cited race as a "something I really, deeply believe in."

Going to be fun to listen to all these GOP governors brag about how they saved their states and created jobs w/o stimulus money. Oh, wait...
' @RalstonFlash via TweetDeck
TPM:  

Ron Paul supporters staged a loud and bitter revolt at the Republican convention Tuesday, undercutting what GOP officials hoped would be a unifying moment as they officially made Mitt Romney their nominee.

Brendan Nyhan:  

Voters who take the word of elite political journalists would be forgiven for thinking that the first events are the presidential debates and the second are the party conventions, but as the political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien show, the truth is actually the opposite (see also James Stimson's Tides of Consent, which reaches a similar conclusion). Party conventions help to remind partisans who have strayed from their core views what they really believe and also influence independents who don't have strong links to either party, creating bounces in the polls that frequently persist through the end of the campaign. By contrast, the well-practiced exchanges that dominate presidential debates rarely provide the game-changing moments that the media loves to pretend are commonplace. Indeed, the debates occur too late to have much effect in all but the closest races.

Again, have to state it again: It's remarkable that an entire night of programming is built around "You didn't build that" #NBCPolitics
' @mmurraypolitics via web

CBS:

As many as 57 percent of registered voters say it's possible they would vote for a candidate that disagreed with them on the issue of abortion, according to the poll, conducted Aug. 22-26. Thirty-four percent said they could not support such a candidate.

Women are more likely than men to say they could not vote for a candidate who disagreed with them on the issue of abortion (38 percent of women said so, compared with 29 percent of men). Additionally, Democrats (37 percent) are more likely than Republicans (27 percent) to say they could not do so.

Women who won't do so are more likely to be Democrats and to think abortion should be allowed in all cases or with greater restrictions.

Also, same poll:

Most voters, 59 percent (including a majority of women), do not think Akin's comments reflect the views of most Republicans. But a quarter of Democratic women think Akin's statements represent the views of most Republicans, and they are strongly supporting Mr. Obama.

ABC/WaPo poll:

Romney's popularity dips ahead of opening night

And we expect that to be reversed by Ann Romney and Chris Christie?