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Saturday, August 6, 2016

What Will Media Do When The Hillary Convention Bounce Disappears?

In the last three days, the mainstream media has been filled with stories about how the Trump campaign is "imploding" and Hillary Clinton is pulling to a huge lead over Trump.  Most of this, however, is nothing unexpected.  During the week to 10 days after a party's convention, the nominee of that party normally has a major increase in his or her poll numbers.  It's called the "convention bounce".  Trump had his right after the GOP convention and he pulled into the lead over Hillary.  Hillary had hers and it is ending now.  Instead of talking about a convention bounce, however, most of the media has been treating the poll movements as if they were the end for Trump and his campaign.  I've seen so many declarations of Trump's political death this past week that I sometimes felt like I was watching one of those TV shows about a medical examiner.

Today, we are getting indications in the polling that Hillary's bounce is coming to an end.  The Los Angeles Times poll has Hillary leading by less than half a percent (44.6% to 44.2%).  Trump has been improving his position in each of the last two days for this daily tracking poll.  Then there's the Reuters Ipsos poll.  Reuters-Ipsos conducts a very poor poll; it is heavily biased towards the Democrats.  Even so, today's Reuters Ipsos poll shows a lead for Clinton of 41% to 39%; four days ago, Hillary was ahead 44% to 34% over Trump.  Other very recent polls have shown the race getting closer again when compared to the polls that were taken immediately after the Democrat convention. 

None of this tells us exactly where the race is likely to settle once the convention bounces are over.  It does tell us, however, that all those stories about the death of the Trump campaign were just idiotic wishful thinking by the mainstream media and propaganda from the Clinton campaign.  Hopefully, the silly and phony stories about some big name Republicans holding an "intervention" with Trump will end.  Maybe we will also get a reprieve from stories about what the GOP would do if Trump were to drop out of the campaign; only someone extremely gullible would swallow something this ridiculous.

There is one thing that ought to happen now.  If a candidate were to make statements and predictions as off base as some of these recent "end of Trump" media stories, that candidate would be constantly hounded on the subject.  It would be inescapable.  Well, it's looking like many in the media have been terribly off base in their discussion of the campaign.  My suggestion is that those ignorant reporters who fell for pushing this story line should likewise be hounded on the subject.  Let them explain why they have been putting all that nonsense out there.  They really have only two choices:  either they are (1) morons, or (2) shill for the Democrats.

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