Mitt's veep choice won't help ticket
Ryan: a high-risk, low-reward pick
By Jonathan Bernstein, WashPost
Mitt Romney is rolling out his running mate in the morning, and all signs appear to point to Wisconsin Member of the House Paul Ryan. It’s a high-risk, low-reward pick. Mostly recapping what I’ve been saying about Veepstakes for the last few months:
Political scientists generally have found that good running mates do little to help the ticket in November beyond the possibility of adding a couple percentage points in the vice-presidential candidate’s home state.
That is, Paul Ryan is a low-reward pick because all running mates are low-reward picks. Perhaps it’s a little lower than usual: as someone who only represents one congressional district, Ryan is presumably less well known and liked in his home state than typical picks who have won statewide, although since picks from the House are rare, it’s hard to really know.
However, a poor pick can hurt the ticket some nationwide, although probably the only two to really do that over the years were Sarah Palin in 2008 and Tom Eagleton in 1972. Other picks that performed poorly during the campaign – Richard Nixon in 1952, Dan Quayle in 1992, perhaps Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 – haven’t been shown, as far as I know, to have cost any significant number of votes.
Paul Ryan is high-risk for one basic reason: most of the picks who have done badly during the campaign or in office or have looked bad after the fact have one thing in common: very little high-level campaign experience. Those who have survived a presidential campaign or at least multiple statewide (governor or Senate) campaigns have a much better track record. Yes, Ryan has been on national TV quite a bit, but doing that even as a very high-profile Member of the House is just not even remotely in the same ballpark as a national campaign, or even a statewide campaign. That doesn’t mean that he’ll do badly; there’s no obvious alarms as there were with Sarah Palin, who was (incredibly) chosen despite an active ethics investigation against her.
(More here.)
By Jonathan Bernstein, WashPost
Mitt Romney is rolling out his running mate in the morning, and all signs appear to point to Wisconsin Member of the House Paul Ryan. It’s a high-risk, low-reward pick. Mostly recapping what I’ve been saying about Veepstakes for the last few months:
Political scientists generally have found that good running mates do little to help the ticket in November beyond the possibility of adding a couple percentage points in the vice-presidential candidate’s home state.
That is, Paul Ryan is a low-reward pick because all running mates are low-reward picks. Perhaps it’s a little lower than usual: as someone who only represents one congressional district, Ryan is presumably less well known and liked in his home state than typical picks who have won statewide, although since picks from the House are rare, it’s hard to really know.
However, a poor pick can hurt the ticket some nationwide, although probably the only two to really do that over the years were Sarah Palin in 2008 and Tom Eagleton in 1972. Other picks that performed poorly during the campaign – Richard Nixon in 1952, Dan Quayle in 1992, perhaps Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 – haven’t been shown, as far as I know, to have cost any significant number of votes.
Paul Ryan is high-risk for one basic reason: most of the picks who have done badly during the campaign or in office or have looked bad after the fact have one thing in common: very little high-level campaign experience. Those who have survived a presidential campaign or at least multiple statewide (governor or Senate) campaigns have a much better track record. Yes, Ryan has been on national TV quite a bit, but doing that even as a very high-profile Member of the House is just not even remotely in the same ballpark as a national campaign, or even a statewide campaign. That doesn’t mean that he’ll do badly; there’s no obvious alarms as there were with Sarah Palin, who was (incredibly) chosen despite an active ethics investigation against her.
(More here.)
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