Bill and Tim’s Excellent Adventure
How to get a convention bounce with this One Weird Trick.
Tonight I’ll be hosting the post-DNC live show! I’m planning a good three hours on why Josh Shapiro would have been better than Tim Walz because I know that’s the kind of #content you people want. 😉
I kid because I love.
I’ll be joined by Joe Perticone, Andrew Egger, and (possibly?) Sam Stein and we’ll analyze what should be a fairly important moment for the campaign as Coach Walz introduces himself to America and sets the table for the vibe Kamala wants going into her big night.
Come and hang with me on our YouTube, immediately following Walz’s conclusion.
Also: Sarah and I are doing a special Secret pod today! Hopefully I’ll have it to you by mid-afternoon. XOXO
1. Bouncing
I said that Walz night was fairly important, but is that true?
No. But also yes.
Conventions never have straight-line, A→B causal impacts on elections and individual speeches are never dispositive. But it’s useful to think about a convention like a tennis racket, where the individual speeches are strings and the campaign is the ball. When you hit a tennis ball, all of the strings play some role in imparting spin. This spin influences the trajectory of the ball, sometimes in radical and important ways.
For the most part, you only notice the impact of an individual string if it breaks and causes a mis-hit.
What I want to talk about today is the ability of a convention to impart spin on the trajectory of a campaign and how Bill Clinton and Tim Walz might do that.
The first goal of a convention is: Do no harm. The worst convention in modern history was the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, which descended into chaos. That didn’t happen this year. This year’s protests were a joke. The Democratic party is unified.1
The second goal is: Maximize momentum. The second- and third-worst conventions were George H.W. Bush in 1992 and John Kerry in 2004. Let’s look at what happened with them.
In 1992 Democrats held their convention in mid-July and Bill Clinton absolutely exploded out of it. He had been running even with President Bush going into the convention and rose by, depending on your poll between 16 points and 27 points. It was a historic bounce and Clinton never looked back. President Bush’s bounce later that summer was a paltry 5 points.
In 2004 John Kerry was running well against the other President Bush—but Kerry’s convention left no mark. His numbers either stayed flat or ticked backwards by a point. Kerry wasn’t able to build up another head of steam as Bush pushed forward, getting a small—but real—bounce out of his convention in New York City.
So how are Democrats doing so far on Goal #2?