“Don’t be surprised if Biden doesn’t get a convention bounce in the polls. That’s not the point,” declared an early Friday headline in the Washington Post. Post-convention surges are hard when the country is polarized and the parties “stage theirs back to back, as they will this year,” argued opinion writer Karen Tumulty.

Except both things were just as true in 2016, which didn’t stop the media from treating the “convention bounce” as a thing of conventional wisdom. Either way, the problem was not that the virtual Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin didn’t move the needle for the Democrats and their ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris – it’s that it somehow managed to jolt the public opinion in favor of Trump!

The president’s approval rating among likely US voters stood at 47 percent on Wednesday, with 51 percent disapproving. By Friday morning, those numbers had flipped completely, to 51 approval and 47 percent disapproval.