(Newser)
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President Obama has been doing very well in the polls lately—and it's looking less and less like the product of a post-convention bounce. According to the FiveThirtyEight prediction model, Obama now has a 76.1% chance of winning reelection, up from 75.2% on Wednesday, Nate Silver writes for the New York Times. But that number assumes Obama is still riding a convention bump, and there's some evidence to suggest that bump has dissipated. Remove the post-convention penalty the model imposes, and Obama's odds go up to 83.9%.
Twenty-one high-quality polls have been run in swing states since the conventions, and Obama has led in all of them, by an average margin of six points. If that's really the case—and not just the result of a temporary convention bounce—then Romney "will probably need some sort of external contingency to give him much of a chance at winning," Silver says. And Romney "will need to see Mr. Obama's numbers decline fairly soon if he wants to bank on the convention bounce hypothesis."
