White voters favor Romney, but not enough

The Morning Plum: Obama’s convention bounce

By Greg Sargent, WashPost

One of the big questions heading into the weekend was whether Friday’s weak jobs report would detract from whatever bounce Obama was set to get after last week’s Democratic National Convention. It’s not fully clear yet how the jobs numbers will impact the race, but if Gallup tracking data is to be believed, the early returns suggest that Obama is enjoying a post-convention bounce that has yet to be impacted by them.

On Sunday, Gallup showed Obama leading Mitt Romney by five points, after steadily widening his lead from the 47-46 the race had been stuck at for weeks. Of the seven polling days (Sept. 2-8) that went into Gallup’s horse race tracking, four of them were taken on days after viewers saw a convention speech. Two of them — Friday and Saturday — came after Obama’s speech and after the Friday-morning release of the jobs numbers (though in fairness it might have taken a day for the unemployment news to sink in).

Gallup sends over more data that sheds more light on his bounce:

* In the seven-day tracking, Romney is only leading Obama by 53-41 among white voters. If this is accurate, this could be trouble for Romney. As Ron Brownstein has noted, he may need as much as 61 percent of the white vote to win; Obama, by contrast, needs 40 percent of it to win if he matches his 2008 total of 80 percent of all minorities. Gallup has Obama at his target; Romney is not close enough to his.

(More here.)