When Democratic Party chairman Mr Terry McAuliffe told a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Saturday that his private polling showed Mr John Kerry two points ahead in the key battle ground state of Ohio, there was wild cheering, but privately many in the audience said they frankly didn't believe it.
However yesterday a Newsweek poll showed the Democratic challenger had in fact pulled ahead of Mr Bush by two points not just in Ohio but nationwide, completely erasing - at least for now - President Bush's two month-long lead.
Following his commanding performance in Thursday's presidential debate, the Democratic challenger is ahead of Mr Bush by 47 to 45 per cent, with 2 per cent for independent Ralph Nader, and in a straight match-up, Mr Kerry leads by three points.
"This is within our grasp," Mr McAuliffe told a forum hosted by Irish American Democrats, gathered in a trade union HQ in Philadelphia, prior to an afternoon of door-to-door campaigning in the Pennsylvania capital.
The party chairman said he had "zero tolerance for hand-wringers" among Democrats and that "John Kerry is knocking the ball out of the park" despite a negative campaign "by the dirtiest group of people I have encountered in 25 years in politics".
The Newsweek poll showed that six out of ten voters saw John Kerry as the clear winner of the debate, compared to two in ten who thought Mr Bush won. Even one in three Republicans said they felt Mr Kerry had been triumphant. Most voters in the poll said Mr Kerry came across as more confident than Mr Bush and had a better command of the facts, and rated the Democrat overall more favourably than Mr Bush by 52-49 per cent.
In a significant turnaround, they found Mr Kerry, often characterised as aloof, personally more likeable than Bush by 47 per cent to the president's 41 per cent.
Almost half of those polled said they felt the Iraq war was unnecessary and they had been deceived about the reason for ousting Saddam Hussein, and in a further danger sign for the Bush campaign, four in ten said they believed a second Bush administration would take the unpopular measure of reintroducing a military draft.
The good news for President Bush is that he continues to outscore Mr Kerry on coping with homeland security (52-40 per cent) and Iraq (49-44 per cent) though these margins are much smaller than four weeks ago, and they show that Mr Kerry has made headway in portraying Iraq as a "colossal error" and decoupling Iraq from the war on terror.
Ominously for the president, many late night television programmes made him a figure of fun over the weekend, showing video clips of him smirking, rolling his eyes, pursing his lips, scowling, and complaining "it's hard work" being president.
The next two presidential debates, in Missouri and Arizona, will focus on domestic issues and the economy, both areas on which Mr Kerry leads Mr Bush.
In exchanges since the debate, President Bush accused Mr Kerry of a new "doctrine" under which "America has to pass a global test before we can use American troops to defend ourselves". This was a reference to Mr Kerry's comment that while he supported the right of a president to order a pre-emptive strike to protect the country, it must pass "the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing, and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons".
The Kerry campaign responded with an ad rejecting the president's comment and saying: "George Bush lost the debate, now he's lying about it."
At the Irish-American forum, Mr McAuliffe disclosed that he had spent three hours with Mr Bill Clinton, who is convalescing at his upstate New York home from heart surgery, and said that the former president would be ready to start campaigning for Mr Kerry in the next two weeks.
Congressman Richard Neal, from Massachusetts, told the forum that Mr Bush four years ago had promised to unite the nation and "thank God he has united the Democratic Party against him". Former Congressman Bruce Morrison said "George Bush is all Texas swagger" on Ireland and had broken a promise to take care of the issue of deportations of Irish immigrants with prison records due to the Troubles.
While Mr Kerry won on Thursday, the polls could swing towards Mr Bush again: observers pointed out that Mr Walter Mondale, Mr Michael Dukakis and Mr Ross Perot, all losing presidential candidates in the last three decades, won their first debates.
In Philadelphia on Friday, singer Bruce Springsteen began a series of anti-war concerts at which he urged support for Mr Kerry. Springsteen said he supported the military action against Afghanistan but "we dived headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq".