Trump gets a convention bump. Here's what that means.
Donald Trump appears to have received a decent-sized bump in the polls from the Republican National Convention. The RealClearPolitics rolling average of a two-way matchup shows a Trump jump of about three and half percentage points. Before the RNC he trailed Hillary Clinton by 3.2 points. Now he’s up 0.2.
What’s this tell us about the state of the race?
It shows that GOP voters may indeed have rallied behind his candidacy, for one thing. If the role of a convention is to reel in wavering partisans, then last week’s events in Cleveland may have been successful, no matter how much they broke with campaigning norms.
For instance, Trump’s now got the support of 81 percent of Republicans, according to a just-released CBS poll. That’s up a bit from earlier in the month.
What this means is that the split in the party may be largely between ordinary voters and Republican elites, particularly current and former elected officials. Ted Cruz’s refusal to endorse Trump during his speech last week is the most obvious example of this schism.
But many in the party elite simply skipped Cleveland. Others, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, barely mentioned Trump in their convention addresses, focusing instead on the danger of a Clinton presidency.
“Most leading Republicans view Trump as a poor candidate facing near-certain defeat in November, and they appear worried that any public expression of impassioned support for his campaign risks tainting them with political or historical embarrassment,” writes Boston College political scientist David Hopkins, post-RNC. “But for many Republican delegates, activists, and voters, a Trump loss is far from inevitable and a Hillary Clinton presidency close to unthinkable.”
In the long run the split between the elites and the grass roots could remake the GOP, one way or another. In the short run, its electoral implications are less clear.
But on the whole, many of the things about the Republican convention that appeared chaotic at the time, from the plagiarism charges against Melania Trump to Cruz’s public slap and Trump’s own angry acceptance speech, appear to have mattered little to those who matter most to the GOP nominee.
“My sense is that, despite the media focus on a ‘divided party,’ Trump accomplished his first objective, which was to unify the Republican Party behind his candidacy,” writes Middlebury College political science professor Matthew Dickinson.
However, Trump’s bump doesn’t necessarily mean he’s suddenly the favorite in the race. The Democratic National Convention will similarly affect the national mood in ways yet unforeseen.
At the moment, the message from Philadelphia is all about the fallout from leaked emails and the resignation of Democratic National Committee chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
But as the RNC showed, early reports of chaos don’t mean the event will be a political failure. Clinton is likely to receive her own convention bump. It will be mid- to late-August before the numbers settle down and voters see where the race stands as the candidates ready for the fall campaign.
