Bouncing convention forecasts

It’s unlikely next week’s tightly scripted Democratic National Convention will offer any surprises. We know who the nominees will be, the topics they will talk about and the new theme they want to be associated with: “Stronger at home, respected in the world.”

That’s a far cry from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era pledge for “a New Deal” for the American people, or John F. Kennedy’s daring political challenge to explore a “new frontier,” which we’ve heard in previous Democratic Conventions.

Is “stronger at home, respected in the world” the best platform John Kerry could come up with to address the global war on terrorism?

These quadrennial rituals, once filled with unexpected twists and turns, backroom battles and lengthy roll call votes between opposing forces, are no longer the exciting, gavel-to-gavel events political reporters remember.

That’s why the broadcast networks plan to dedicate only an hour or so to their evening coverage over the four-day gathering in Boston.

Perhaps the only surprise (if you can call it that) will be the “bounce” the two parties get in their post-convention polls — something political pundits eagerly await and are already talking about. Virtually all major polling organizations are preparing for it, even pre-analyzing what, if anything, is at stake.

“A higher-than-expected bounce can be seen as abnormal and a plus for the party in question,” the Gallup Poll states in a pre-convention analysis (titled “The Bounce Game”). “A lower-than-expected bounce (or no bounce at all) may be interpreted as a sign of trouble for a party’s candidates.”

But the bounce game can get more interesting, thanks to the prebounce strategies both sides play to guard against any damaging surprises that could hurt their respective tickets.

“Thus, the focus of polling conducted in and around the conventions is not so much that a bounce occurs as it is a matter of interpreting the bounce against expectations,” the analysis report states.

For example, earlier this month, President Bush’s chief campaign pollster and strategist Matthew Dowd wrote a memo intended to inoculate Mr. Bush from any embarrassing bounce numbers. Mr. Down wrote he expected a Democratic Convention bounce would leave the Bush-Cheney ticket at least 15 points behind their challengers. “Assuming that Kerry enjoys the average challenger’s bounce … we should expect the state of the race to swing wildly to his favor by early August,” Mr. Dowd said.

But an analysis of past convention bounces tells a far different story: The candidate who ends up with the highest bounce does not necessarily win the election:

• Al Gore got a much larger bounce from his 2000 convention than George W. Bush did (8 points for Mr. Gore and 4 points for Mr. Bush), but Mr. Bush won the Electoral College vote, though not the popular vote.

• Michael Dukakis got a 7-point bounce in his polls in 1988, compared to a 6-point bounce for George H. W. Bush, but the senior Bush easily defeated the Massachusetts Democratic governor.

• Former Vice President Walter Mondale got a huge 9-point bounce after his convention in 1984, vs. a tepid 4-point bounce for Ronald Reagan, but the Gipper went on to crush Mr. Mondale in a 49-state landslide.

• In 1980, President Jimmy Carter earned a giant 10-point bounce after his convention, slightly above Ronald Reagan’s 8-point advance, but the former California governor easily defeated the Georgia peanut farmer.

• Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater received a bigger bounce from his San Francisco convention in 1964 (5 points) than President Lyndon B. Johnson got (3 points), though LBJ was far ahead in the polls and buried Goldwater in a landslide.

Of course, there are examples where higher bounces were followed by easy victories.

Bill Clinton’s convention turned in the highest bounce on record — 16 points — in 1992, while the first President Bush scored only 5 points and lost his bid for a second term.

In 1972, South Dakota Sen. George McGovern, running on an anti-Vietnam War platform, received no bounce at all from his protest-plagued convention (few voters saw his delayed “come home America” acceptance speech in the wee hours of the morning). President Nixon, who got a 7-point bounce, won by a landslide.

The average bounce from the past 10 elections is 6.1 points, but in the final analysis there seems to be little, if any, correlation between bounces and the election results that follow them. But that won’t deter all those TV pundits from analyzing “the meaning” of the bounces and how they might affect the outcome.

The truth is they mean nothing.

Once the conventions are over, it’s an entirely new ballgame played out in a political environment that can turn on unexpected, election-altering events.

Rather than betting on the bounces, pundits would be better advised to pay closer attention to the longer-term trends, like this one: Since 1968, Democrats have won only three out of the last nine presidential elections.

Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.