Is Romney taking a risk?
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight thinks he is and Paul Ryan is that risk.
When the status quo isn’t proceeding in a way that you feel is favorable. When you have less to lose. When you need — pardon the cliché, but it’s appropriate here — a “game change.”
When a prudent candidate like Mitt Romney picks someone like Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, it suggests that he felt he held a losing position against President Obama. The theme that Mr. Romney’s campaign has emphasized for months and months — that the president has failed as an economic leader — may have persuaded 47 or 48 or 49 percent of voters to back him, he seems to have concluded. But not 50.1 percent of them, and not enough for Mr. Romney to secure 270 electoral votes.
That reading may be correct. National polls tell different stories about the state of the race — but most have Mr. Obama ahead. Polls of swing states have been a bit more consistent. In states like Ohio, Mr. Obama’s lead has been small — but it has been steady and stubborn. …538, NYT
Paul Ryan is very, very conservative, more conservative than any VP who has been a member of Congress since the turn of the last century.
He is also more conservative than any Democratic nominee was liberal, meaning that he is the furthest from the center. …538, NYT
He may or may not help Romney win Wisconsin. Probably not. Obama is very strong in Wisconsin in spite of — maybe because of — the effort to recall Scott Walker. Romney is “quite far behind” in Ryan’s home state.
Beyond Wisconsin, Ryan will draw crowds and be a “money magnet,” but his budget plan continues to “poll poorly.”
The fate of the presidential race and the fate of Congressional races may become more closely tied together. Mr. Obama will no longer have to stretch to evoke the specter of Congress and its 15 percent approval rating. With Mr. Ryan on the opposing ticket, he will be running against a flesh-and-blood embodiment of it. ...538, NYT
Nothing seems to be about to make this easy for President Obama. Here’s how the race looked in the last survey, just before this weekend.
The forecast model I developed for FiveThirtyEight, which accounts for state and national polls and the condition of the economy but not other factors, estimated as of Friday that Mr. Obama was about a 70 percent favorite to win re-election. Betting markets and bookmakers have been slightly more equivocal, but have also had Mr. Obama ahead, generally giving him between a 60 and a 65 percent chance of winning a second term.
Either prediction allows for plenty of winning scenarios for Mr. Romney. …538NYT
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Why would Romney take on a fight that President Obama has been itching to have? Here was Obama in April, running against what then seemed his pipe dream ticket of Romney-Ryan: “The Republicans running Congress right now have doubled down, and proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal. In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget ‘radical’ and said it would contribute to ‘right-wing social engineering.’ This is now the party’s governing platform.
“This is what they’re running on. One of my potential opponents, Gov. Romney, has said that he hoped a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on day one of his presidency. He said that he’s ‘very supportive’ of this new budget, and he even called it ‘marvelous’ — which is a word you don’t often hear when it comes to describing a budget.”
This is the fall conversation that Romney wants to enable? …Ruth Marcus, WaPo