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This Is Not the Ryan Effect You Are Looking For

Pew’s new survey includes some bad news for Ryanmaniacs: The report notes that Ryan’s numbers are slightly worse than some comparable Democratic running mates from previous elections: Views of the Ryan vice presidential selection are somewhat less positive than those for John Edwards in 2004 and Al Gore in 1992. There doesn’t seem to be […]

Pew’s new survey includes some bad news for Ryanmaniacs:

The report notes that Ryan’s numbers are slightly worse than some comparable Democratic running mates from previous elections:

Views of the Ryan vice presidential selection are somewhat less positive than those for John Edwards in 2004 and Al Gore in 1992.

There doesn’t seem to be much support here for the idea that there is a Ryan-inspired “movement” taking off across the country. Even among Republicans, there is not as much strong approval for the choice as one would have expected. When 20% of your own partisans are underwhelmed by the choice, and another 20% don’t know what to think about it, that suggests that choosing a relatively obscure Congressman who has spent his entire career in Washington may not have been the clever political maneuver that many movement conservatives believe it to be. The reaction among independents is more of a problem. Considering how poorly-known Ryan still is to most voters, it doesn’t bode well that 42% of independents already give the choice a fair or poor rating.

Another detail that should give Ryan fans pause is that the vast majority of Americans has no idea that Ryan is the one responsible for his Medicare reform proposal:

At this point, most Americans do not associate Ryan with the proposal to change Medicare. Just 23% of those who have heard about the idea of shifting Medicare to a system of credits to buy private insurance identify it as Ryan’s [bold mine-DL]. Nearly as many (17%) say Barack Obama proposed this, while 44% do not know who proposed it.

If most Americans don’t link Ryan with a proposal half of them reject, that could mean that approval of the Ryan choice is artificially high. What happens to those numbers when voters discover that this proposal came from Ryan? Nothing good for the Republican ticket, I’ll wager.

Update: A new WSJ/NBC News poll finds that Ryan’s selection has so far had no meaningful impact on the race:

Some 22% of those polled said Mr. Romney’s pick of Mr. Ryan as his running mate made them more likely to back the Republican ticket, while an almost equal share, 23%, said it made them less likely to do so. Some 54% said it made no difference.

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