McCain-Palin seeing a 'Gibson Bounce'?

By C. Edmund Wright

Could it be that the McCain-Palin ticket is seeing a "Charlie Gibson bounce" in their poll numbers? Perhaps.

In today's Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll, McCain broke out of a week or more or less being tied with Obama to show a 3% point lead at 50-47%. It also marked the first plus 50 day for the McCain Palin ticket. Now, the signficance of this poll vis a vis Gibson is today's Rasmussen tracking poll includes surveys taken Thursday, Friday and Saturday. In other words, this was the first poll including only surveys conducted after the first excerpts of the Palin-Gibson interview hit the news and it replaced the last day of surveys conducted before that happened.

Saturday's figures replaced those from last Wednesday in the Rasmussen formula of using a 3 day rolling sample. Wednesday was the last day of emphasis in the news cycle of Palin not doing any tough interviews. One can perhaps extrapolate that as the nation has learned a bit more about Palin -- and a bit more about media bias -- it is liking McCain-Palin better. Obviously polls are not perfect and will fluctuate many times between now and election day, but today was a significant one in Rasmussen for the reasons above, and it was good news for the GOP.

Could it be the Gibson bounce?