It’s beginning to look like Donald Trump got a perceptible bounce from the Republican National Convention. The latest RealClearPolitics average of recent polls has him leading Hillary Clinton by 44.1-43.9 percent, and leading her in five of the six polls conducted wholly or partially after the convention assembled July 18.
The model projects Trump as having a 46 percent chance of winning the election, up from 22 percent on July 12. They show Trump as the favorite to win the following Obama 2012 states — Florida, Ohio, Iowa, Nevada — which would leave Clinton with 273 electoral votes and Trump 265.
The website’s Nate Silver, writing before some of the polls referenced were reported, is appropriately cautious about whether there’s a genuine bounce. What looks significant to me is that Trump’s support in the RCP average has bumped up against what has seemed, so far, to be his ceiling: He averaged 44 percent on Feb. 3, 43.4 percent on May 24 and today is at 44.1 percent.
That’s not a winning percentage, unless support for third and fourth-party candidates reaches double digits. And that percentage could well decline after four days of pummeling at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and Hillary Clinton’s percentage, currently near her nadir, could rise.
But those of us who thought Donald Trump had a ceiling of support in the Republican primaries, a ceiling quite possibly lower than 50 percent among GOP voters, were proven wrong. We’ll see if he can rise above what has been a ceiling in this race, once he manages to track down the whereabouts of the Rev. Rafael Cruz in Texas 50-some years ago …
