Jay Reding.com

The first batch of post-RNC polls are out, and they contain good news for John McCain.. In the Gallup Tracking poll, McCain is up 3% against Obama. In the Rassmussen Tracking poll, McCain is tied 48% to 48%.

These polls show that McCain did get a bounce from the RNC, and that this race is very fluid. It would not be surprising if these numbers get better for McCain by mid-week as weekend polls sometimes undercount Republicans.

I am going to go off on a limb and predict that Obama will underperform his polling numbers—just as he did in New Hampshire in January. I believe that there is a strong “bandwagon” effect among Obama voters and that McCain will actually peel away some of the Hillary voters that have “come home” to the Democrats after the DNC.

Watch the swing state vote—states like Colorado, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan will decide this election. Obama needs some of the key Western states to win. McCain must take Ohio and Florida to win. Obama has to hold all of Kerry’s states and peel off enough electoral votes for the red states to win.

If Pennsylvania goes to McCain, Obama is toast. He is unlikely to pull enough additional electoral votes to make up for that loss. If I were McCain, I’d be having Sarah Palin circling the Great Lakes states while McCain pulls Colorado, Nevada, and possibly New Mexico from Obama.

This race is completely up in the air. McCain has taken some of the wind out of Obama’s sails. He has an opportunity to run as an “agent of change” and beat the prevailing political climate. Obama is now on the defensive, and could lose. The debates will be critical, and the next two months will be some of the most exciting in American politics yet.

UPDATE: The latest Gallup/USA Today tracking poll has even better news for McCain: a lead of 10% in a survey of likely voters. That poll is likely an outlier, but there’s little doubt that McCain has gotten a bounce from his convention, and that Obama’s lead has evaporated.

UPDATE: Today (Sept. 8), McCain has a 3.2% lead in the RealClearPolitics average. All the major polls show the race either tied, or with McCain in the lead. There’s no doubt that McCain got a bounce from the convention, and that it was a substantial one. The question will be whether he can make the best of that momentum into Election Day.

With my usual caveats about the utility of polling this far out from an election, Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll shows John McCain well ahead of either Clinton or Obama. McCain leads Obama 50-41 and Clinton 49-42. This sample showed Clinton narrowly ahead of Obama as well.

What does this mean? This far out, not much. However, it does indicate that McCain was the right choice for the GOP. After eight years of Bush, the GOP needs a figure that can reach out to independents. It was the shift in independent voters to the Democrats that made 2006 such a bloodbath for Republicans. McCain, even though conservatives have their issues with him, is someone who can attract independent-minded voters. In some ways, all the conservative backlash to McCain may help him—conservatives aren’t going to hand the election over to either Hillary or Obama, and the conservative backlash makes it more difficult to paint McCain as an extremist. Independent voters want someone who will exercise independent judgement—and McCain’s maverick rep helps him there. He wasn’t a “maverick” because it made him popular, or he would have pulled a Hagel on Iraq, he was a “maverick” because he was doing what he thought was right. Independent voters want to see that in a candidate, and McCain has that strong appeal.

On the Democratic side, Clinton is down, but not out. She’s going to fight on, and while some argue she has no realistic chance at the nomination, that isn’t going to stop her. In essence, the Democrats are stuck with a Catch-22. If they nominate Clinton, people will walk away from the party, and someone like Nader could break 10%. If they nominate Obama, they’ll marginalize older voters (who vote in droves) in the hopes of attracting younger voters (who eventually grow up and become Republicans). Plus, if Obama gets the nod it means key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania could be in McCain’s column. The electoral math doesn’t favor Obama—no Democrat will win Georgia or Mississippi. Winning Kansas and Nebraska is great if your goal is to beat Clinton in pledged delegates, but those states are so likely to vote Republican in November that they’re virtually irrelevant to the general election.

I would hate to be a Democratic superdelegate right now. There’s no good answer: either vote for Hillary in the hopes that she’ll peel off a state like Ohio from McCain and squeak in, or vote for Obama in the hopes that the Electoral College math will somehow add up. Neither of those options are particularly good ones.

At the beginning of the year, having a Republican nominee running ahead and the Democrats in a brutal internecine war would have been one of the least likely outcomes of this race. Then again, perhaps that’s why politics can be so interesting to follow…