Noam Scheiber points out something that was very predictable, that the nomination of Paul Ryan as the Republican vice-presidential nominee has done enormous damage to Mitt Romney’s ability to appeal to senior citizens. He says that while the 47% tape hurt him, Paul Ryan’s views on Medicare have done far more damage:
But it’s worth pointing out another dynamic that’s been overlooked here: The escalating disaster that is Paul Ryan…
This week the New York Times released a set of polls, conducted by Quinnipiac, assessing the state of the race in Ohio and Florida. The top-line numbers were jaw-dropping enough: Obama’s lead in Ohio grew from six to ten over the last month, and from three to nine in Florida. (It’s better to focus on the change here than the magnitude, which is highly sensitive to polling methodology.) But once you look at the internal numbers, they’re even less kind to Romney. More to the point, they suggest Ryan has done enormous damage to the ticket.
Back in late August, Obama led Romney on the question of who would handle Medicare better by 8 points in Florida and 10 points in Ohio; now he’s up 15 in Florida and 16 in Ohio. And the problems are especially acute among senior citizens, a group Obama has traditionally struggled with. A month ago, Obama was down 13 points in Florida among people 65 and older; today he’s up 4. On the specific question of Medicare, Obama was down 4 points among Florida seniors in August; today he’s up 5 points…
The numbers for Ohio are similar: In August, Obama was down 8 among seniors in the state; today he’s up 1. A month ago Obama was down 6 points among Ohio seniors on the Medicare issue; today he’s up 6. The turnaround here is simply breathtaking.
Other polls have found similar results. Let me ask the obvious question: How did they not see this coming? It was my very first reaction to the Ryan nomination, that Romney was going to put seniors in play for Obama in a way that they rarely are for Democrats. Elderly voters have been one of the most consistent constituencies for the Republican party for decades and now Obama is likely to win a majority of that vote in November, especially in key states like Florida.
This only reinforces what I said at the time of the nomination, that Ryan was as much of a Hail Mary pass as Palin was in 2008. The only way Romney makes that pick is if he’s convinced by his advisers that they have little chance of winning the election without shaking up the race. But it’s done exactly what any half-observant person would have predicted.
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Neil Rickert
October 3, 2012 at 11:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I had exactly the same reaction to the Ryan choice.
I think it shows that Romney is running scared of losing his conservative base, so felt a need to shore up that support.
Modusoperandi
October 3, 2012 at 11:15 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sure, but you know that polls are biased. Once you account for that, by removing all the Democratic voters, the Ryan pick pushed Romney’s support up to 100%. Now all Romney has to do is replace himself and he’ll be a shoe-in.
laurentweppe
October 3, 2012 at 11:18 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Because they thought old people are stupid?
Zinc Avenger (Sarcasm Tags 3.0 Compliant)
October 3, 2012 at 11:19 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Sadly the Republican disdain for the “reality-based community” neglects to account for the fact that the voters they rely on live in reality, which is famously unforgiving to those who ignore its existence.
Donovan
October 3, 2012 at 11:31 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’m starting to think it wasn’t a Hail Mary by Romney, but what he thought was a good decision. I think he has so little a clue as to what the other half is like, that he thought any old Blue Collar looking partner would work. It’s like asking your grandmother for candy and getting cough drops instead. A WTF moment that leaves poor grandma wondering what she did.
raven
October 3, 2012 at 11:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
One very old (80′s) person I know was planning to vote for Romney. They hate taxes and perceive the GOP as anti-tax.
Now they are neutral, disliking both Obama and Romney. I suspect it was the attack on Medicare that did it. 80+’s can be heavy users of medical care. That is how they ended up living that long.
I’ve tried a little to figure out what Ryan’s and Romney’s economic and Medicare funding plans are. With little success. They are very vague and their vague plans keep changing.
AFAICT, Ryan’s going to save Medicare money by just not paying out much money. That will work for sure especially when old people start dying en masse…from lack of medical care.
nigelTheBold, Venomous Demonic Hater
October 3, 2012 at 11:55 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think there’s a substantial difference between Palin and Ryan nominations. Palin was an unknown, as far as the broader public was concerned. Her track-record in Alaska was not that great — her only real accomplishment was a fairly rapid rise in the Republican ranks due to the void left by Gov. Murkowski. Her actual record was already filled with scandal, from the skullduggery used to build the unneeded and expensive sports complex in Wasilla (and the subsequent questions about the contractors and materials used to build the Palin house, connected to the sports complex), the firing of a librarian who refused to pull Heather Has Two Mommies from the Wasilla library, to the handling of Alaska State Trooper Mike Wooten (“Troopergate”), and even to the Palin bridge to nowhere* across Cook Inlet to a very sparsely populated area where the Palins owned land.
Palin’s record didn’t come close to supporting her as a viable VP candidate.
Ryan, on the other hand, had a reputation as a very sharp policy and budget wonk. Whether this reputation is deserved is questionable, but at least he’d done nothing to contradict that reputation. Ryan embodied the current ideals of Republican fiscal conservatism, and appeared to have the chops to back that up.
I don’t think Ryan was nearly as much of a blind choice as Palin. The way I see it, Romney needed a candidate that was a known fiscal conservative with a popular base in order to offset Romney’s record as governor of Massachusetts. They needed to be fairly well-known if they were to provide any kind of traction against “Obamacare.” Further, they needed someone who had a reputation among the religious right.
Ryan was the only logical choice. The fact he sucks doesn’t indicate he was a hail mary choice. It indicates they just didn’t have anyone that could simultaneously appeal to independents and their ultra-conservative base. They figured Romney would pull in the independents, while Ryan would shore up the base.
To me, this just goes to show that the Republicans have fallen so far out of touch that they can’t put together a decent opposition at all.
But then, I’m not a political analyst. I’m just some guy on the internet.
* Not to be confused with the original Bridge To Nowhere, from the city of Ketchikan to the Ketchikan airport on Gravina Island, which is currently only accessible by ferry.
StevoR
October 3, 2012 at 11:55 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
In other news,Romney is hurting Romney with humans.
Bet teh Republicans wish they could wipe that etch-a-sketch clean and start again with a better candidate!
arakasi
October 3, 2012 at 12:34 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I live in Virginia and I was robocalled by the RNC yesterday. The entire pitch was that Obama eliminated $700 billion from Medicare and Romney-Ryan would save it. All I can make of this is that they know that there is a problem, and can’t think of a legitimate way around it – this leaves them too vulnerable to anyone who points out that Ryan’s budget plan calls for the same cut.
Crip Dyke, MQ, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden
October 3, 2012 at 12:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
See, I think Palin and Ryan worked picked in exactly the same, horrible way. And that way isn’t “We gotta throw a hail Mary since if we don’t shake up the campaign”.
That might be another similarity, but that goes to the criteria they chose, not how they pick those criteria or assess how candidates match the criteria.
No, I think that the GOP has been doing their media-manipulating thing for so long, that they so over-reacted to the Kennedy-Nixon debates, and that they have, in fact, had such a significant amount of success with superficial things like branding, that they honestly believe it’s not the policies, it’s the person.
The horrific personal attacks on Dems? Well, if it’s not the policies, it’s the person, you have to attack them personally. Right?
Likewise, if it’s not the policiies, it’s the person, then looking for someone to shore up your base that includes huge numbers of older christians means focussing on their anxieties about your deviations from mainline christianity – thus pick a Catholic! – rather than your deviations from mainstream expectations of policy commitments toward older folk – thus wanting to destroy the foundational assumptions and mechanisms of medicare? Irrelevant!
They chose Ryan by a series of qualifications – does he know people with money? Do the people that are likely to give large amounts of money to Rep’s like him enough that they will give more (or at least not give less) if he’s the running mate? Does he shore up the perception of Mitt’s religion? Does he shore up the perception of Mitt’s extreme wealth?
it’s not about what Mitt will do policy wise. But all those perception things, those are about trusting someone to make the right policy calls. They are important because no one can possibly be informed on all the policy questions related even to issues that someone considers important. So we use proxies. If we care about Medicare and don’t have time to find out about someone’s actual policy positions – especially when the details are often crucial and myriad – then it matters that someone has hundreds of millions in the bank, since they don’t pay their own bills (I mean it comes out of their money, but they dont’ sit down and write a check to a doctor, they have frickin’ accountants or they just charge everything without looking at the cost and then have an accountant pay the charge card. They seriously don’t think about whether a doctor bill is $25 or $250 and whether all or part of that is co-pay vs. some other detail of uncovered care.
But if you bring on someone who says: no more medicare, buy insurance, but we’ll help you by paying part of it, now you KNOW the policy. And you know what a headache it is dealing with individual insurers and how impossible it is to know what illnesses you’ll eventually get – or even the odds of different diseases – and the costs associated if onedoes come down with something. Medicare is there so that the coverage is very broad and has treated enough people that it is focussed on the things that make the most difference. We dont’ need to know all the details to know that if it really starts messign people over, there will be political consequences til it gets fixed. Medicare is more accountable than a private insurer. Thus pushing people into a private market will result in millions of bad decisions from people who haven’t been trained to make them, and lots of needless misery. Generally, it’s something to be avoided.
And Mitt brought on a partner who thinks this is a great idea.
This doesn’t shore up his weaknesses, it exacerbates them. But the GOP didn’t predict it because when it says, “People don’t make up their minds based on policy, they make it on perception” they forget that we don’t do it because we care about perception alone. We care about perception because it is a *proxy* for policy. This is why people who hate Obama think he’s going to do the exact opposite of what he has done. they are using certain signifiers to infer policy positions rather than take the time to inform themselves about policy.
But they aren’t lying when they say they care more about, say, taxes than the color of his skin. It’s just that they make assumptions about his tax policy based on the color of his skin. When some say that they hate him based on racism and they insist they hate him because he’s going to tax the country into oblivion, this is really just an argument about how far back into causation we go.
“I hate him because I think X.” feels true to these folk. They aren’t realizing or accounting for why they think X, but the statement isn’t wrong per se.
Anyway, maybe that’s too far off the main point. Perceptions matter, but they matter because we want certain things from our leaders, and those things aren’t white skin or christianity. Those things are things like Medicare.
And when the GOP thinks that substance no longer matters, they make decisions as if substance no longer matters.
And they pick Paul Ryan and genuinely believe that he’s going to help Mitt w/ older christians because of his christianity, regardless of his policies.
In the same way, they picked Palin for appearance, because appearances were all that mattered.
These are falling apart for different reasons, however. In one, they fell apart because they didn’t even do a good job of picking for appearance, forgetting that appearance is more than a smile, but that what comes out of your mouth affects appearances as well. The second pick is falling apart even though they did a much better job of picking for appearances. It’s just that the substance of Ryan is scary on exactly those issues where the appearance of Ryan was supposed to be reassuring… and when those things get out (as they sometimes don’t, but this Medicare stuff was too central to Ryan to paper over) people don’t need to rely on proxy anymore: they have the substance (or at least some of it) and the detriment done by the substance is far more than can be overcome with the appearance.
It really is a different train wreck. It has the same cause – picking for appearances without regard to substance – but they really left the track at different points.
nigelTheBold, Venomous Demonic Hater
October 3, 2012 at 12:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Crip Dyke:
You make some good points. And I think your analysis is spot-on: they are definitely campaigning on a cult of personality, rather than on policies. I think Obama has a bit of the cult of personality thing going too, but I think he at least articulates cogent policy as well — as ineffectual as he’s been in implementing some of those policies, and as much as I detest much of his handling of The War On Terror™.
And I guess your analysis gives me a bit of hope: that a pivotal part of the public prefers pointed policy past pure personality (alliteration for the win!) makes it seem as if we’re not quite as hopeless as I sometimes feel.
thalwen
October 3, 2012 at 12:59 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, this was a known unknown, not a unknown unknown.
Mitt just made the situation better by being appalled that these people think they deserve health care, and food.
John Hinkle
October 3, 2012 at 1:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
They may have seen it coming. Perhaps they put too many eggs in the basket of voter suppression laws.
Didaktylos
October 3, 2012 at 2:01 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
May they think that voter suppression will the proverbial Smith & Wesson that beats four aces …
Didaktylos
October 3, 2012 at 2:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That should have been “Maybe they think …”
twincats
October 3, 2012 at 3:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think it’s because they think that old people are greedy and uncaring like they are and that’s not even close to the case.
I know my 84-year-old dad would rather I have Medicare to look forward to than a voucher in a decade-plus; I also think that preference extrapolates to the majority of older middle-class Americans with kids and grandkids.
Hugo
October 3, 2012 at 7:55 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I like the sound of that. Reminds me of Colbert’s quote “Reality has a well-known liberal bias”.