Romney gets no convention bounce; unimpressive grades for speech

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A new national opinion survey shows that last week’s Republican convention provided only minimal benefit for GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Voters weren’t particularly impressed, either, with Romney’s big speech on the closing night.

The new Gallup poll found that only 38% rated Romney’s address good or excellent. That’s substantially lower than the ratings given to eight other acceptances speeches, going back to Republican nominee Bob Dole’s in 1996.

According to the poll, released Monday, the net impact of the GOP convention was a slender two percentage points. That’s the difference between the number of voters who said the event made them more likely to vote for Romney and those who said they’d be less likely to vote for him. The results were based on post-convention polling, conducted Friday and Saturday, and fell largely along partisan lines.

The Romney camp has pushed back against suggestions that the Tampa, Fla., convention provided no “bounce” for the GOP ticket. Romney strategist Stuart Stevens said he did not expect much of a boost but pointed to a Rasmussen Reports poll (which has been consistently more favorable to Romney than other national surveys) that showed a modest bounce for the Republican.

Gallup’s widely followed tracking poll has detected no impact yet from the convention. It has continued to show President Obama leading Romney by a single percentage point, unchanged from the pre-convention period (actually, there’s been no significant movement in the race since May).

“The two-week convention phase of this election is now at its midpoint,” Gallup editor-in-chief Frank Newport wrote in an online posting. “We won’t know what the impact of the two conventions is until roughly Sept. 7-13, the full week after the Democratic convention closes in Charlotte [N.C.].”

Gallup’s margin of error was +/- 4 percentage points.

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Paul.west@latimes.com

Twitter: @paulwestdc