Did Conventions Put Obama in Front-Runner’s Position?

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Numbers cruncher and statistical analyst Nate Silver suggest that the back to back GOP and Democratic conventions may have pushed Barack Obama into the front runner position.  There is certainly no question that the two conventions highlighted the alternate universe that is today's GOP versus the Democratic Party.  Whether or not the apparent Obama lead will hold is anyone's guess, but the data suggests that the GOP attempt to portray Mitt Romney as anything other than a cold, money loving, arrogant man who knows - and worse yet cares - nothing about the lives of most Americans.  He and Ann Romney are truly today's would be Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.  Here are highlights from Nate Silver's piece in the New York Times:

On Friday, we began to see reasonably clear signs that President Obama would receive some kind of bounce in the polls from the Democratic convention.

Mr. Obama had another strong day in the polls on Saturday, making further gains in each of four national tracking polls. The question now is not whether Mr. Obama will get a bounce in the polls, but how substantial it will be.

Some of the data, in fact, suggests that the conventions may have changed the composition of the race, making Mr. Obama a reasonably clear favorite as we enter the stretch run of the campaign.

On Saturday, Mr. Obama extended his advantage to three points from two points in the Gallup national tracking poll, and to four points from two in an online survey conducted by Ipsos. He pulled ahead of Mitt Romney by two points in the Rasmussen Reports tracking poll, reversing a one-point deficit in the edition of the poll published on Friday.

A fourth tracking poll, conducted online by the RAND Corporation’s American Life Panel, had Mr. Obama three percentage points ahead of Mr. Romney in the survey it published early Saturday morning; the candidates had been virtually tied in the poll on Friday. (The RAND survey has an interesting methodology — we’ll explore it more in a separate post.)

The gains that Mr. Obama has made in these tracking polls over the past 48 hours already appear to match or exceed the ones that Mr. Romney made after his convention. The odds, however, are that Mr. Obama has some further room to grow.

Obviously, I hope the bounce for Obama grows since, in my view, it is critical that the GOP in its current state must be defeated in November for the good of the country.  It is far past time that angry white evangelicals be impacting the future of the country.