Digging Into the Postconvention Polls

This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on August 2, 2016 His­tor­ic­ally, polls start tak­ing much great­er pre­dict­ive value around 30 days after the last con­ven­tion, so the peri­od just be­fore Labor Day week­end marks when we should start tak­ing the polls es­pe­cially ser­i­ously. Hu­man nature be­ing what it is, however, we are ob­vi­ously go­ing to start look­ing soon­er. And with both con­ven­tions hav­ing been held, we are not faced with quite the asym­met­ric situ­ation that we were in with the polls re­leased just after the Re­pub­lic­an con­ven­tion but be­fore the Demo­crat­ic con­ven­tion star­ted. The first ma­jor na­tion­al poll to be taken after the con­clu­sion of the Demo­crat­ic con­ven­tion was one from CBS News, con­duc­ted by live tele­phone in­ter­view­ers Fri­day through Sunday nights (Ju­ly 29-31) of 1,131 re­gistered voters. That poll gave Hil­lary Clin­ton leads over Don­ald Trump of between 5 and 7 points, de­pend­ing upon wheth­er un­de­cided voters who leaned for a can­did­ate were in­cluded in the sup­port totals and wheth­er it was a two-way tri­al heat with just Clin­ton and Trump offered or a three-way tri­al heat, with