Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: More blips and bounces

The new Huffington Post pollster.com model by Simon Jackman.

Yeah, you can still build your own. But you can also download all the polling data. How cool is that?

Mark Blumenthal:

Multiple new polls shows a continuing bounce for President Barack Obama that translates into a significant Electoral College lead. With more than seven weeks remaining before Election Day, however, the crush of daily polling has just begun.

On Intrade, Romney has dropped 10 points in 5 days.

 

WaPo:

A slew of new polls suggests that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is lagging behind President Obama in several crucial swing states.

The polls may be the best indicator yet that a post-convention bounce has given the president's campaign a surge of momentum 53 days before the election ' at least for now.

Harry Enten:

This week, the New Republic's Nate Cohn published a piece entitled "Exploding the Reagan 1980 Comeback Myth". Cohn makes two solid claims based off the data.

First, Reagan had a higher ceiling than Romney as indicated by his convention bounce. Reagan held a large lead, while Romney has never led during this campaign.

To make it easy for conservatives: Romney is not Reagan, Obama is not Carter, and this isn't 1980.
' @DemFromCT via TweetDeck
Ed Kilgore:

The 'battleground' has shrunk a bit in recent weeks, with NM, MI and (probably) PA being conceded to Obama. In the remaining nine contested states (CO, FL, IA, NV, NH, NC, OH, VA and WI), NC is the only one where Romney currently has a documented lead. But all these states remain close, and Republicans are reasonably confident about FL and VA assuming the election stays close or gets closer. Romney obviously needs a good performance in the upcoming debates (on October 3, 16, and 22, with the vice-presidential debate on October 11), but barring a major gaffe, it's 'debatable' how much these events will move a small undecided vote. Romney will continue to walk a tightrope between appealing to swing voters and keeping his mistrustful 'base' happy, particularly if the current Obama lead persists and conservative activists renew demands that Mitt go more negative or get more substantive.

Jonathan Bernstein:

Mitt Romney made it pretty clear today on Good Morning America: his tax plan (and his overall budget plan) will rely on two parts pixie dust, three of Jeannie's blinks, a pinch of technobabble from Geordi La Forge, and something about the Elder Wand (which, I have to confess, I've never quite understood). That is, it's all magic and fiction.

Greg Sargent:

There is an astonishing amount of complaining among conservatives about how unfair the media was to Mitt Romney yesterday in reporting on ' and calling out ' his criticism of Obama over the Embassy attacks. The gist of the complaining is that the U.S. Embassy statement was, in fact, an apology in the face of aggression, and that news outlets are stifling legitimate criticism of Obama on foreign policy.

But oddly enough, the critiques tend to avoid directly addressing, or defending, the main thing about Romney's comments that news outlets and commentators found newsworthy or objectionable.

Jack Wright via John Sides:

Is Unemployment Actually Helping the Democrats?

This article calls into question the conventional wisdom that incumbent parties are rewarded when unemployment is low and punished when it is high. Using county-level data on unemployment and election returns for 175 midterm gubernatorial elections and 4 presidential elections from 1994 to 2010, the analysis finds that unemployment and the Democratic vote for president and governor move together. Other things being equal, higher unemployment increases the vote shares of Democratic candidates. The effect is greatest when Republicans are the incumbent party, but Democrats benefit from unemployment even when they are in control.

But ... but ... the jobs report. Or the next one. Obama's doomed. Doomed.

ctpost:

The campaign staff for Linda McMahon might want to give movie posters a try.

Everyone's seen them. "Fantastic!" the poster screams out, with a small-print citation. Few people will bother to check the full quote, which may be something along the lines of "This movie is a fantastic failure in every respect." No matter. "Fantastic" is in there, so that's good enough.

The McMahon campaign is pushing something similar. The stakes here are considerably higher.

Politico:

A Gallup poll released Thursday showed that for the first time since 2007, voters were just as likely to call Democrats the better party to fight terrorism as they were to name Republicans. Polls have consistently shown that about two-thirds of voters believe the Afghan war, once a symbol of necessary U.S. intervention, is no longer worth fighting.

Jamie Fly, who heads the conservative Foreign Policy Initiative, said it's been a challenge for Republicans to convince a war-weary U.S. electorate that President Barack Obama's more cautious, consensus-oriented approach to foreign policy has been a failure.