Putting lipstick on the pig (the post-convention bounce, that is)

538.com has offered up an interesting analysis of the post-convention (ok, Palin) bump for McCain.

He is indeed up ... but most of that gain is in strong Republican base areas. He/she is appealing to those states where the Republicans should have already been strong. A better measure of tracking the election will be available at the end of September, when the convention speeches will be gauzy memories.

the popular vote and the Electoral College are significantly diverging. Although the Republicans seem to be polling stronger than they were in the pre-convention period almost everywhere, the differences are much larger in traditionally red states, particularly in the South and the rural West (Colorado and Nevada, by the way, are not rural states).
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McCain's gain in our popular vote projection has been 2.1 points. Note, however, that his gains have been less than that in essentially all of the most important swing states, including Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Only Virginia is on the other side of the line, and then only barely so.

As a result of all this, the Electoral College remains too close to call, even though McCain has a 1-2 point advantage in the popular vote.

That last sentence points to a potential Electoral College situation in which that anachronistic system could again trump democracy:

Obama now has an 8.4 percent chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, which is far and away the highest that this number has been all year. And that number may get larger rather than smaller, once polling filters in from other red states like Texas, Nebraska and South Carolina.

The 538 of the site's name refers to the total number of Electoral College votes. Assuming only McCain and Obama win the electoral votes —not a Constitutional given, by the way, but that's a discussion for another day— the magic number for victory is 270.