Momentum and bounce
Momentum is an actual property of physical objects, and explanations of flight, spin, and bounce in terms of momentum (and other factors) genuinely explain something. Electoral poll proportions, on the other hand, can only have ‘momentum’ or ‘bounce’ as a metaphor — an explanation based on these doesn’t explain anything.
So, when US pollsters talk about convention bounce in polling results, what do they actually mean? The consensus facts are that polling results improve after a party’s convention and that this improvement tends to be temporary and to produce polling results with a larger error around the final outcome.
Andrew Gelman and David Rothschild have a long piece about this at Slate:
Recent research, however, suggests that swings in the polls can often be attributed not to changes in voter intention but in changing patterns of survey nonresponse: What seems like a big change in public opinion turns out to be little more than changes in the inclinations of Democrats and Republicans to respond to polls.
As usual, my recommendation is the relatively boring 538 polls-plus forecast, which discounts the ‘convention bounce’ very strongly.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »