Will Kamala Harris get a boost from the Democratic convention in Chicago? Since President Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Harris has enjoyed mostly favorable news coverage and renewed enthusiasm from Democrats. Many national and state polls have her barely ahead of Donald Trump. The whirlwind tour with her VP nominee Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, will likely produce more positive coverage. Will her honeymoon continue through the convention?

In 1964, Gallup began systematically reporting presidential candidates’ convention bounces by comparing the candidate’s position among registered voters in the Gallup poll taken before the convention to their first post-convention sounding. The organization’s careful analysis was the gold standard for convention effects from 1964 to 2012. The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara took over the work of updating the trend when Gallup stopped conducting presidential preference polls in 2016. 

In 1988, George Gallup, Jr. and Alec Gallup wrote that, “Gallup surveys over the past 40 years have shown the impact of political conventions usually is short-lived with candidates soon reverting to their pre-convention support levels.” That year, George H.W. Bush’s six-point bounce moved Bush into a tie with Michael Dukakis (seven-point bounce) in a race where Dukakis had consistently led in Gallup’s polling. On Election Day, Bush swept the election. 

There are many historical nuggets in the convention bounce surveys. Mitt Romney was the first Republican not to receive a convention bounce. Three Democrats, George McGovern in 1972, John Kerry in 2004, and Joe Biden in 2020 did not get one, either. All four were challenging incumbent presidents. Bill Clinton’s 16-point bounce in 1992 was by far the largest bounce, followed by Jimmy Carter’s ten-point bounce in 1980. Ronald Reagan had an eight-point bounce that year. In our deeply polarized age, recent bounces have not been large. Presidential campaigns start in earnest after the conventions end, so convention polls may simply be a snapshot in time.

The American Presidency Project has not released data on this year’s GOP convention. But our own analysis, using Real Clear Polling averages on the Sunday of the convention week to the Sunday afterward, shows  a gain of less than a single percentage point for Trump.             

Sadly, surveys of convention delegates, another revealing staple of convention coverage for many years, aren’t done anymore. It is a time-consuming and expensive project for pollsters and others who appear to pay more attention these days to the hot news topics. Starting in 1968 and continuing for 40 years, CBS News, under the auspices of poll director Warren Mitofsky and bureau chief Martin Plissner, polled the delegates to both national party conventions. CBS asked delegates about their sex, age, profession, and other demographic variables and their attitudes on issues. AEI brought together the delegate data  for the first time and interviewed the CBS researchers about their work. They responded:

For most of the 150 year history of presidential conventions, national parties paid little attention to who or what the delegates were or how they got there. . . [S]tate parties usually sent delegates populated by their principal party and public offices, their most generous contributors, and lesser servants whose turn for reward had come.

According to Plissner and Mitofsky, the 1968 convention was the last convention of the old order, after which party leaders determined to make the delegates more representative of their rank and file. The changes were impressive, too. In 1980, 13 percent of the delegates to the Democratic national convention were women. By 2008, 49 percent were. DNC meetings had more women than GOP confabs.

Delegates tend to be the most passionate party members. Among Democrats, delegates consistently lean more to the left than rank-and-file Democrats, and they lean considerably to the left of the population as a whole. Take the question CBS asked about abortion. In 1996, 61 percent of Democratic delegates said it should be legal in all cases. Thirty percent of all Democrats and 25 percent of the population as a whole gave the same response. In 2008, the picture was the same. The pattern was reversed for the GOP, with Republican delegates to the right of rank-and-file Republicans and the nation as a whole.

Without these invaluable surveys, we can only guess if the pattern is the same today.   

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