No evidence of a bounce

Chris Bowers is orders of magnitude more insightful than David Gergen, so I won't mock him. However, he's wrong to see significant evidence of an Obama bounce from his foreign trip. I know that my chart of Obama's lead doesn't show any bounce. Also, I don't see any bounce in Pollster.com's chart either, which Bowers cites. I just don't see Pollster's average ever dipping down to 2.1% during Obama's trip. I suspect that at some point in time, Pollster had the race at 2.1% because of some randomness in which polls were released to the public first; however if we take their current chart as their best view of the race through time, it's pretty clear that there's little evidence of a significant bounce.

Of course, Bowers is right to criticize Adam Nagourney's dumb concern that Obama fails to crack 50%. When 10% of voters are undecided (and thus likely to split somewhere between 60-40 and 40-60), a candidate with 46-50% support is clearly winning.

Just to be clear, I don't have a view yet about whether there has been a bounce. I look forward to the next week of polling.

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