Gallup Daily for Saturday is Out

Yesterday was a very busy political day. It was the first day since the completion of the convention and the day that McCain announced Palin as his choice for vice president. As Gallup Daily Tracking observes:

The Friday interviewing was conducted in an unusual political environment -- the first conducted fully after Obama's well-regarded acceptance speech and McCain's surprise announcement of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate. Each event in isolation has usually been associated with increased candidate support for the relevant party.

The long and short of it is that McCain's vice presidential nod seems to have held Obama at the same level he was the day before:

Obama 49
McCain 41

Since Gallup called it 45-45 when the convention was starting, the fact that we now have an eight-point lead means we got an eight-point bounce out of our convention.

Since 1964, the average convention bounce has come in around 10 points. My guess is that if McCain hadn't announced Palin yesterday, we would have gotten that.

Update: TCQuad in the thread pointed out I made an error. On Sunday a week ago, McCain was up by two points: that was the last full day before the convention started. Monday data probably didn't reflect the convention much, but it had Obama up one point over McCain 45-44. In other words, Obama made the typical 10 point bounce and would have gone further probably without the McCain announcement.