Gallup: Signs of an Obama convention bounce

This week's Democratic National Convention has delivered a bump in President Obama's poll numbers, according to new Gallup data released on Friday that show Obama out-bouncing Mitt Romney in the immediate wake of the Democratic Party's gathering.

A slight majority of Americans, 52 percent, surveyed Tuesday through Thursday said that they approve of the job Obama is doing as president, his highest approval rating since early June 2011, a month after the U.S. military killed Osama bin Laden. Forty-three percent disapprove in the latest poll.

In Gallup's horse-race tracking poll, conducted over the past seven evenings among registered voters, Obama leads Romney, 48 percent to 45 percent. That is not a significant change from the previous seven-day sample, when Obama and Romney were statistcally tied, 47 percent to 46 percent respectively. But the wide range of field dates for this tracking poll means that any bounce could lag behind other, more immediate surveys; Friday's release is the first conducted entirely after Romney's acceptance speech last week.

Any bounce for Obama could be fleeting, however, as Friday's latest Bureau of Labor Statistics employment surveys showed meager job growth in August, potentially stepping on this week's Democratic convention here in Charlotte. The vast majority of the interviews for both measures also were conducted before Obama accepted the nomination Thursday night.

The latest figures on Obama's job approval are derived from 1,602 interviews with adult Americans and carry a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

For the Obama-versus-Romney numbers, Gallup interviewed 3,248 registered voters from Aug. 31 to Sept. 6, for a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.